


The Guest

by MilkshakeKate



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Cohabitation, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Pining, Relationship Negotiation, Roommates, Sexual Tension, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 05:52:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14805596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkshakeKate/pseuds/MilkshakeKate
Summary: How long before an ex-lover outstays his welcome? And how much longer can a broken arm, a missing watch, and a hopeful heart afford him?





	1. Relocation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Turningleaf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Turningleaf/gifts).



> My love!  
> Happy Birthday! I hope you have a lovely day, and that this absolutely morbid beginning to an eventually-I-promise Happy Fic will provide a little bit of entertainment!! It's finished, but the last two chapters are unedited atm! I hope that a first, maudlin lil chapter to start you off will suffice after such a drought!! We'll yell all about this, and all the rest, later, I know it.
> 
> Happy reading! Lots and LOTS of love,  
> Kate xxx

 

Illya

 

  
Nobody could miss that victorious boom of an explosive, of shattering concrete, splintering girders.

Illya leans up on his good elbow but he can’t hold himself up for long. He can’t even swing his legs over the side of the slab; with heavy shackles on his ankles and no fuel inside him, he can only lie down and wait.

When the vault door begins to warp and melt, and a warm orange glow seeps through the metal like the press of a hand, Illya can feel his heartbeat in his ears.

Napoleon Solo’s gloves are off and his fingertips are on Illya’s pulse point, even though he is looking Illya right in the eyes and is speaking to him.

“Don’t talk. Can you move?”

There is rifle fire behind the ruined vault door but Illya can only close his eyes, still tender for his bruising. When he opens them Gaby is there. Gaby, miraculous and dressed head to toe in tactical black. She is checking his temperature with the back of her hand. Her neat little brows are furrowed, her eyes hard as she looks at his arm, tracing its strange new shape.

Illya tries to takes her wrist but she stops him, gentle.

“Can you move?” he’s asked again. Her voice rasps sweetly like she is trying to be quiet, as if there isn’t gunfire behind her or dried blood in his ears at all.

Can he move?

Illya swallows, and tries.

 

 

Then comes the drive, curled up on the back bench of Gaby’s getaway car and shivering in the biting air of a January night. Icy wind pushes at his hair, turns his nose pink. His lungs feel twice the size and they ache in the good way; in Russian, Illya had begged them to keep the window open.

The dread of being tracked, of finally having his chain yanked back from its end, is soothed by German instructions from the front seat: sleep, Illya, try to sleep. Solo is in the passenger seat, reaching back to tuck Illya’s blanket closer with one hand and rustling a road map with the other. The sound is so familiar, once so far away but now so close, that Illya is rocked into dreamless sleep.

He doesn’t know which hospital he’s in, but it wouldn’t help even if he did. He sleeps through the day and rests through the night; two months of underground compound dwelling has done a number on his body clock, and endless light is something he’s struggling to get used to. In his brief snatches of consciousness Illya’s eyes are too sensitive to the overhead bulbs, his ears still aching after the blast, the contact damage.

There are bottle green tiles and metallic little snipping sounds everywhere.

Is he still in New York?

He can smell alcohol, pure alcohol. He can see pyjamas. And dancing.

 

 

Illya’s eyebrow itches like hell. Turning his head to rub it on the pillow provides small relief but then the room bursts with a sharp panic, a gasp, a rustling of bags and newspapers and when he opens his eyes, Gaby is looking directly at him. Gaby, all deep, dark, sleepless eyes, sizing him up again like a hawk.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

It’s ridiculous, how slow he is to respond. His mind is five sludgy paces behind his own mouth. “Moya brov'” Illya croaks, squinting, and tries to scratch his eyebrow with his thumb— he stops, never having felt so weak in his life. His right arm weighs ten tonnes, yet somehow it’s floating like a feather above his head too. He isn’t sure he’d even tried to move it at all, or had only thought of it.

“You have a cast,” Gaby explains, and lays a warm hand on his shoulder. “And you’ve had plenty of morphine. What’s ‘brov’’?”

Illya frowns and the itch splits into a sharp sting all the way down to his temple. He hisses through his teeth. “Oi… Mamochka.”

Gaby can’t hold back a small smile, hides it behind her fingers. She composes herself when he tries to scratch it again, reaches over the bed to hold his cast down to the mattress. Her fingers brush his skinned knuckles and the contact sends a sting through all his nerves. He’s just sensible enough to know not to flinch.

“You have stitches, too. No touching.”

He swallows. “Please.”

Gaby huffs, then peers behind her at the glass separating their little world from the hospital beyond it. She’s gone for hours before she turns back to look at him. Very softly, she relents: “Where?”

Illya rolls his eyes up to the offending eyebrow and winces again for just the smallest movement. Gaby reaches over to smooth down the tape with her fingers, and he rumbles with satisfaction.

“You’re a baby.”

He only swallows again, tries to loosen his tongue.

“Do you want to talk for a little while?”

Illya lets his head be cradled by the pillows, nestles down deeper to get comfortable. In time, he nods.

She doesn’t let go of his arm.

 

 

“You didn’t fight them off.”

Illya hums, croaky and tired as he chews on dry toast. “Was not on brief.”

“Since when did you go by the brief?”

He would frown if he could. “Before you. Cowboy.”

“Ah. When you were a good boy.”

Illya looks at her dully.

“Relatively,” Gaby adds, and smiles.

It might be the morphine, but Illya can’t find it in himself to argue.

 

 

 

Gaby is gone, but a man is standing by Illya’s hospital bed with an expensive raincoat over one arm and a greetings card in the other. The card — tactfully left unsealed, considering his injuries — depicts a sickly watercolour kitten, sporting a bandage over both ears and sucking on an over-sized thermometer.

This time, Illya does frown.

“Welcome back, Kuryakin.”

He should be sitting up. Instead he is squinting up from his thin pillow like a distrustful, decapitated head.

Mr. Waverly doesn’t seem to mind, choosing to pull up Gaby’s chair with only a mannerly “May I?”

Illya rolls his head to face his superior. There must be something in his expression that gives him away, because Waverly immediately raises a hand as if to halt an accusation.

“Now there’s no need to be alarmed, Mr. Kuryakin. This is a social visit. I have a fair bit of time to spare this morning, what with none of you causing anywhere near as much trouble of late, so I thought I’d drop by to see how my most decorated member of staff is getting on.”

Illya misses Gaby’s German. Suddenly he is very, very tired.

“Good,” Illya answers. It comes out as a croak, and isn’t strictly the truth, so he tries again. “Better.”

“Jolly good.”

Illya looks at the card.

“Ah. Best wishes from the team,” Waverly says. He doesn’t insult Illya by opening it, nor by propping it on his chest like he’s a table. Rather he slots it into Illya’s loose left hand and, with a bit of a fumble, Illya manages to open it with his thumb and forefinger.

Inside are plenty of scrawled well-wishes. He recognises most of the names, but is embarrassed to find surely ten he doesn’t. In the bottom right corner is Gaby’s neat little name, two kisses. In the centre, Napoleon Solo’s ridiculous Hollywood autograph, three kisses.

Illya is not certain how standard an exercise this is for an international intelligence organisation.

“Thank you,” he decides. He watches the card as it’s whisked up to the shelf behind his head, out of sight and out of reach.

“Appearances have a hand in the gesture, but I assure you the sentiment is genuine.”

Illya nods. As he tries to gather what he wants to say, Waverly gives him some time. “My agency? They… make contact?”

Waverly’s expression pinches briefly. “They are aware of the situation. Were aware, I might add, as it was unfolding.”

Illya tenses, the way he does when he thinks of home. “They did nothing,” he supplies.

“It appears not.”

Illya looks out of the window.

“There is the small matter of your accommodation to consider, once you are with us again.”

So much for a social visit. Illya was hoping not to consider his accommodation at all, perhaps ever again. He wonders if Waverly himself has entered his flat, and whether it is in a worse state than when he was taken from it. Illya has lived in tens of residences in his career, every one of them temporary, but the little apartment had finally begun to feel… comfortable. He liked the street, mere minutes away from the Kosher market, the Polish deli, the metro station which, though less grand than any of Moscow’s, was very convenient for work. Perhaps it had all been too convenient, considering how easily he had been caught. Caught out. How easily he had let that guard down, relaxing in his own flat without shoes on, like he lived there. Like he belonged there.

Waverly is expecting a response. Illya doesn’t know whether he has been asked a question, so he asks one of his own.

“Where will I go?”

 

 

 

Gaby’s car passes the pristine glass doors of another hotel, a warp of chrome accents flashing under street lamps.

“It’s not ideal,” she says, again. Her gloved hand has been passing over the gear stick so smoothly that Illya isn’t convinced he’s awake. At two o’clock in the morning, neither of them ought to be. “But it’s temporary.”

As they come to another red light, Illya tries to relax his grip on his knee. He hasn’t yet received an explanation for why he isn’t being smuggled to Napoleon’s penthouse: a larger, more secure building and closer to work besides. Illya only supposes that the frequency of Solo’s midnight guests might prove an obstacle for keeping his whereabouts a state secret.

Napoleon had visited fleetingly last night to drop off a change of clothes; the ratty trousers and vest Illya had occupied for two months have likely been taken as evidence. He isn’t yet used to his own slacks or his own white undershirt, the only thing that will fit over the cast. He’s even wearing his own shoes.

“A few days, Waverly said.”

Illya hums grimly.

“You know, you could thank me.”

“Thank you,” Illya says, and turns to look at her in earnest. She is staring resolutely ahead, her neat profile glowing deep red for the traffic lights above, as if she’s only in the darkroom with him again, back at HQ, and none of this had ever happened.

A professional relationship is something he ought to have gotten used to with Gaby, after their mutual agreement. Work has taken priority over the relationship that threatened to swallow it. Illya has had months to accept this, and has adhered to the rules strictly and without fault. Though he knows it is the right thing to do, he does not have to believe it. His feelings for her had jeopardised their work more than once; he is too protective, too blinded to keep an even head. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight. He compromised her. He stifled her.

She had the last word. She called it off. For a while, she’d said. For a while.

But Gaby does deserve honesty from him. She is still a friend after all, still his professional partner, and she has endured worse confessions from him than the embarrassment he feels for being shuttled about like a senile relative.

“I do not want to be a burden.”

Gaby finally meets his eye, just as she’s washed from amber to green. “You aren’t.” She slips into gear like it’s a part of her, and Illya wonders if she drives like this when she’s alone or if this is only another dance of hers. “You aren’t a burden, Illya.”

 

 

“I don’t suppose I need to give you a tour,” Gaby says, frank, with her keys jangling as she hangs her coat up on the hook. She slips off her shoes, gestures for Illya to do the same.

Now that they’re inside Illya is allowed to take off his hat, but he doesn’t want to put it down without being told where, so he holds onto it, pinching the brim hard with his good hand. “No,” he admits. He remembers.

“Well I didn’t have much time to prepare, so — drink?”

“No, thank you.”

Gaby wanders into her minuscule kitchen anyway. He hears the green cupboard doors opening, closing. The yellow drawers opening, closing. The tap gurgling, obeying at last — sounds he hasn’t heard in a very long time, unique to Gaby and to Gaby’s New York flat. Stepping further down the hall, even the creak of that one wonky floorboard is the same. He cringes.

“Solo should have brought everything in,” Gaby calls. “Do you see them?”

“What?”

“Your things. Are they there?”

Clutching his hat, Illya stalks down the narrow hallway to the open living room at the end. He peers around the corner. On her little orange settee sits a leather night bag. Illya hesitates, bends to report back through the kitchen serving hatch.

“There is a bag. It is not mine.”

“No, Solo went to your place and packed your things. What is left of them, at least. Must be his bag.”

Illya frowns.

Gaby rounds the corner with a glass of something for herself and another she sets on the coffee table. “You must be thirsty. I haven’t seen you drink anything without a tube in a while.”

“We do not have to talk about it.”

Gaby takes a sip from her wide, shallow glass. Illya can’t tell if it’s water or vodka, but he can guess. She tilts her chin at him. “How’s your arm?”

It aches, the cast weighs a tonne, it hangs uselessly in its sling like a stone. “Fine.”

She stands there for a moment, looking over his broken arm as if to provide critique. Without her shoes on she is just as small as he remembers. Then she advances, just four silent steps on her plush carpet to reach out and Illya doesn’t know what she wants, doesn’t know whether to turn towards her or step out of her way.

She takes his hat from his hands and puts it on the coffee table. “I’m sorry that they did this to you.”

Illya exhales. His acknowledging nod is tired and stilted. He turns away, deciding that now is the right time to look through the overnight bag.

She turns on her heel behind him and he closes his eyes.

“You should sleep on the floor,” Gaby says, gravitating towards her bedroom door. “The couch is small.”

“Yes.”

“There are blankets in the cabinet.”

He nods again, dumbly. He remembers that, too. “Thank you.”

“Well,” she says. She taps her bedroom door with her heel, swirls the missing ice in her glass. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

The door shuts more gently than it used to.

 

 

In the car she had offered him her bed.

Lying on his back, Illya is fixated. How long has he been thinking about the last time? The last time he’d been laid flat on Gaby’s living room carpet, back when professionalism hadn’t mattered at all?

He quickly extinguishes that memory.

His Get Well Soon card leers at him in the dark from the mantel of Gaby’s electric fire. He doesn’t know how long he’s been staring at it. Gaby doesn’t have a clock in her living room. In the compound Illya had never known what time it was, and in the hospital there had only been a sun-bleached circle where a wall clock used to be.

He has lost his father’s watch.

Illya grips his bare wrist in the dark, wincing for the strain in his broken arm before only gripping tighter. The cast weighs heavy on his stomach. He wonders if Gaby is awake too, just a few steps away. No more than ten, he estimates.

Just ten.

 

 

 

When they present him with a syringe, Illya does fight. He fights against the leather straps around his calves and his forearms until his fingers begin to thrum and turn a bloodless white, and his hamstrings are wound so tight he’ll ache for days after. But they get him. A needle in the neck and he is mercifully, utterly pain free.

“ _Morphine?_ ” he asks weakly — in Russian, because that’s all he can manage — and they laugh.

Then he is drunk, weightless. He thinks they have broken a bone in his right forearm, just below the elbow, but he can’t feel it. It only sags a little strangely on the arm of the chair. They prod it, and they make notes. They switch to faultless Russian to ask him questions about his father, and his handler, and Napoleon Solo.

They waft something under his nose — vinegar. It smells like vinegar, like ammonia. It smells like the darkroom at HQ. The last time he’d touched her. If Illya closes his eyes to the interrogators’ spotlight, his world colours red, as if he has been pulled under the pendant safelight again by two small, keen hands. The binds on his wrists are just a pair of hands too and, with the injection slipping through his bloodstream like cold water, he can sense his own pulse, and his heart is warm, racing. He’s dizzy, like he was dizzy then, his lungs flickering and light because he’s out of breath, out of his mind — like she was.

“ _Wake up!”_ A slap lands on his cheek. To somebody else in the room they say, “ _Open his eyes._ ”

Illya opens them himself, eyes rolling back as he squints into the light. He expects to see Gaby’s living room ceiling, to have woken up, but he’s still here. Still in the compound, surrounded by blurry faces of men he doesn’t know.

Then he is back in his cell, the walls murky and wavering. The memory of the injection is still swimming in his system, making everything too fast and his tongue too thick.

On the ceiling of the cell he sees sparks of white and blue. A welder’s torch. There is a mechanic up there, leaning into the skeleton of an open car. A blue jumpsuit, dark hair flowing senselessly loose in long, soft ribbons. There is a caged lamp in her little hand — he knows those hands. He calls to her, and when Gaby turns around she is a skeleton too.

 

 

“Illya.”

He groans, his sleep diluting like ink in a pool. His back is full of knots and, forgetting, he tries to stretch his arms over his head — the twinge bolting down his arm reminds him where he is. He lays his cast back on his stomach, defeated. Illya squints up to find Gaby standing over him, looking down as if into his grave.

“The city that never sleeps, hm? Are you used to it yet?”

She is made up and dressed for work. The curtains are still drawn but she has her coat on — a London Fog trench, he surmises, and huffs.

“No. And it is too cold for this coat. You should wear the blue Trigère.”

“I don’t have that one anymore, remember?” He doesn’t. He had chosen it for her in Paris, when they had first become intimate. Cobalt wool, silk-lined. He’d had it altered for concealed carry. Had she gotten rid of it so easily? “Now get up, I need to check you before I go to work.”

“I will do it.”

Gaby scoffs. “I don’t think so.”

Illya braces himself to get up off the floor, elbowing his way onto the settee cushions. It hurts everywhere, from his bruised ankle to the crick in his neck, but he has a point to prove. He will fix himself. He will be up and out of her life as soon as he can, because it’s what she wants. It’s what she’s wanted for months, and he is stifling her again. “I will handle it.”

She watches him sceptically. “I don't think any man can change a dressing properly with one hand."

Illya reaches the cushions, lets out a long sigh as he sits to hide his labouring breath. That had taken more out of him than he’d expected. He hangs his head, braces his hand on the edge of the settee for a moment.

“Illya? Are you alright?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have slept down there,” she decides, low.

“Is fine. Go to work.”

Gaby analyses him. She hums. “I think I should stay at home. Or you should go back to the hospital.”

“No,” Illya says quickly. He looks up at her, hoping she’ll believe him. He meets a doubtful stare. “No. You have work to do. Solo will expect you. Everyone. You should go to work.”

Gaby doesn’t play games like this. She shrugs at his rejection, ever unbothered. “Fine.”

Illya stifles his wince as he sits back properly.

“Don’t touch your bandages, and don’t open the curtains.”

He watches her as she collects her umbrella, chooses her shoes.

“This is temporary,” she reminds him as she slips into a sensible heel, watching him carefully. It’s an authoritative stare. It makes him question whether he ought to be sat on this end of the sofa or the other.

Rather than ask, Illya nods. “Temporary.”

 

 

Wincing, Illya slowly peels the surgical tape from his brow. After spending all night rolling from his back to his good shoulder, the dressing has wrinkled and come loose… Furiously scratching at the scars the moment Gaby had left the building hadn’t helped.

Illya grapples with the tiny scissors, trying to angle them in his left hand while his right arm hangs useless. His weak fingers can’t hold the fabric taut enough for even a clumsy cut. Breathing deep, Illya angles his arm just a centimetre too far, and the broken bone grinds coarse and sharp and Illya swears he can hear it, feels it reverberating in his inner ear. He crushes his teeth together and makes a fist until his palm is lined with little red crescents. He drops the scissors in the sink.

He needs Gaby.

 

 

He has all day. He’s free to walk around her flat, at least, rather than be confined to a hospital bed. Still, he has to find something to occupy his wandering mind, now that he’s here again. Here, in Gaby’s flat, where nearly every surface provides a very visceral memory.

He’d been assured that Gaby’s flat had undergone a full sweep before his arrival, but it will calm him to check for himself. It is something to do. Something to keep him busy.

It doesn’t take him long to find her tool set, so he sets to work — slowly, one handed— on the light switches, the plug sockets. So far so good. Even the phone line is as clear as a whistle, with nothing plaguing the handset nor the socket in the wall. The light fixtures, the radio, and the intercom are clean.

Illya doesn’t know when it turned to snooping. Disinterestedly flicking through her record collection, idly peering at her kitchen notes stuck to the fridge, he finds very little of importance, even if the findings endear him dangerously. When he reaches her bedside drawer, he stares for a very long time at the little porcelain pull, and it stares back.

Gaby is a very beautiful woman. Just because she has chosen not to sleep with him doesn’t mean she can’t sleep with anybody else. The last time he’d looked in this drawer it had been an urgent rifling for something in particular. If he remembers correctly — he does, very well — she’d had a little dark blue box at the back with only one packet left.

He could look. He’s looked before. She’d murmured in his ear to do so, encouraged him, her strong thighs wrapped around his waist and her hand slipping down between them to give him a long, firm pull.

He leaves it. He needs to sit down.

 

 

“ _Where is Alexander Waverly_?”

There is a piece of marble on Waverly’s desk, which has materialised in the middle of the interrogation room. Illya wonders if it’s still there, white and veined with blue and black, sitting in something like a golden egg cup. A gift from Italy — the country, the anonymous men in charge of it. Italy. Rome. A white hat, a race track. The Colosseum at night, ancient cobblestone, Gaby on his arm before she even knew him. Her slim, dark wrist in his hand. He can feel it. He can almost feel it.

It slips away. Did they know about her? Did they know about Gaby?

Illya’s focus rolls down to his own wrist, broken and dream-mottled, and finds only red welts where his father’s watch ought to be.

 

 

Illya wakes with a start to the sharp clack of a door– he jolts, braces his good hand on the arm of the settee as the rattling gets closer, rustling.

“It’s me. Don’t shoot.”

She’s here. Gaby rounds the hallway into her kitchen, arms full of shopping bags. Illya exhales. He watches her through the serving hatch, blinks himself awake. He’d fallen asleep? Again? For how long? Illya checks his wrist – still bare. Of course.

“Do not joke,” he scolds, and rubs his uninjured eye with his palm, hoping it would wipe his dream away with it. “What time is it?”

“About one o’clock.” Looking through the serving hatch, she catches Illya’s confusion. “Waverly sent me home, told me to keep an eye on you. I have paperwork to do. Were you sleeping? That’s good.”

“No.”

Gaby hums, unconvinced. He hears her deposit the bags on the counter and carelessly shuck off her shoes in the hall.

Then she rounds the corner and in moments she’s perching on the coffee table in front of him. Illya clears the surprise in his throat, sits up and blinks hard again to appear more alert.

Gaby lays out the rudimentary first aid kit in her lap. She isn’t watching his face. She’s staring with disapproval at his undressed brow, his cast, the bruising on his eye. He is little more than an ailing car to her like this, and for the first time he is glad for her undivided attention to his injuries. It distracts from his pleasure to have somebody to talk to again. Better still that it’s somebody whose company he enjoys, and has missed.

For months, he has missed this.

Gaby inspects his bare brow, leaning over his lap to prod the bridge of his nose.

“How are you?” he asks evenly, eyes mercifully closed while she prods his eyelids.

“I told you not to take off the dressing.”

“Sorry.”

Gaby sighs through her nose, begins rifling through her kit. “I’m fine. They asked after you today.”

“Who?”

“HQ. Nearly everybody. Nobody knows you’re here, except Solo, but they asked anyway. They think I must know, I suppose. Looks like I will never get rid of you — is this still itching?”

Illya pauses, keeps his eyes closed. “What do you mean?”

His eyebrow is swept by a damp wad of cotton. The familiar cool of calamine lotion, pink and chalky. The itch immediately subsides. Perhaps he could finally relax, if it weren’t for this turn in conversation.

“I mean,” Gaby says, low and patient, “that they clearly didn’t take our agreement very seriously.”

He hears the snip of another tiny set of scissors, feels the cool tips of her fingers as she places fresh tape over the lacerations on his brow. Keeping his eyes closed is dangerous. With her touch, his memories flood back to him. Illya opens his eyes to look at his lap instead, only to see Gaby’s knees gently brushing his. Her navy capris, her strong thighs and the open bottle of calamine lotion braced between them.

“Professional,” Illya says, and bravely glances up at her. She’s unaffected. Unreadable.

“That’s right.”

  

 

She’d brought home a feast in those paper bags. Fresh bread, cured meats, and endless jars of pickled somethings. Just when he believes her to have finished unpacking, yet more comes out: black cherry jam and peppered salami, Dutch cheese and a very large jar of sauerkraut — she has been to his favourite market street in New York, and she remembers his favourites.

But sitting at Gaby’s table now, Illya is beginning to feel very small beneath to the mountain of offerings she presents to him.

“This is for…?”

“Eating. For lunch. I thought you would be tired of watery soup and dry little biscuits.” She sneaks a glance at him, unwrapping another selection of cut ham and layering some on his plate. “Unless you don’t want it?”

“Nyet,” he says, without thinking. Rich and salty everything may be too much, especially after two months of hunger and a week of mealy hospital broth. But his eyes have always been bigger than his stomach, and when Gaby strategically reveals a paper envelope of Turkish Delight, his mind is fully made up. He nods, earnest. “Thank you. This is too much.”

“We are sharing,” she says, and tips a small, careful smile at him. “But you’re welcome.”

 

 

Only migrating from her desk to her tea kettle once in a while, Gaby leaves him to his own devices. At least, she leaves him to sit on her little orange settee and read whatever he likes while she gets on with her paperwork.

Gaby’s five books are barely thumbed paperbacks, and her numerous car magazines are a dead end. Asking after his chess set, Gaby told him she’d told Solo to pack it, and it was likely buried at the bottom of his night bag. It was. Illya wishes he’d discovered it sooner; ever since he’d confronted Gaby’s nightstand, there has been an unruly weed growing in his head, and it has taken everything in him not to rip it out.

When the early winter evening comes to a close, Gaby’s mountainous paperwork is abandoned for the day. She takes a quick swig of vodka and surveys her dimly lit living room. Abruptly she says, “We both have some free time tonight.”

From his station on the settee, Illya nods. He has plenty of free time, but he’s not naive. He knows that Gaby’s workload has been mounting since his... unscheduled absence, picking up his work at HQ where he left off. Indefinitely. She has not complained since his return, not once, but Illya remembers her impatience with the typewriters at HQ, her already sleepless nights spent dwelling on and researching her own assignments, never mind his. She claims Solo had picked up his fair share of Illya’s unfinished work, but Illya has his doubts; the American is not as meticulous in the bureaucratic elements of their work as he ought to be.

So how would Gaby’s rare, precious free time be spent tonight?

“What do you suggest?” he asks, carefully.

Gaby looks him over from head to toe. Illya finds himself sitting up straighter.

“We make dinner,” she says, and Illya must visibly relax because she pauses, and seems to apologise for the rest: “and then we’ll start on your report.”

 

 

Standing over the stove, Gaby’s hair is sprouting loose from her ponytail and haloing her face in dark little wisps. She blows it out of her eyes and shakes her head, taking regular breaks to sip her wine and tuck her hair behind her ears. He has the feeling she won’t ask him hold her hair back like she used to. 

Illya tries not to stare. She's so busy she wouldn’t notice, but he needs discipline in such close quarters. Looking at her like this only reminds him of what he is no longer allowed to do.

Illya is delegated to uselessly stirring boiling cabbage, while Gaby flits between the Krakauer sausages rolling in their saucepan, the mashed potatoes, and doling out the fried onion mustard in thick blobs on mismatching plates. Mostly she tells him to get out of the way, and to put more elbow grease into his one-handed stirring, but he is only too pleased to be in here with her, to smell this food and to watch her work. He loves this room of hers, all they have shared here. She knows he does.

 

 

The table is cleared and then comes the vodka. Still sitting at her tiny bistro table in her living room, his back to the wall, Gaby returns to pour him a generous glass and flips open her duty notepad.

Illya waits while she makes her preliminary notes, watches her dark crown as she scribbles down the date and time before leaning back and looking right at him. She sets up and clicks her handheld recording device to start it rolling.

Illya feels like he is due to be tested, only tonight Gaby is in her pyjamas and her feet are bare — a stark contrast to the interrogations of the compound. Though it feels like another lifetime, it was no more than a week ago.

They should finish this sooner rather than later. He would prefer his burdensome presence to be somewhat useful to her, whatever this exercise achieves. He would like for Gaby to get back to her life. After all, no longer intruding on her work, her time, and her home had been part of their agreement. A vow he had promised to keep.

“I can write with my left hand,” he reminds her, when she shakes the pen back and forth to unblock it.

“Poorly,” Gaby says. “This will be quicker, and I have some questions. Are you ready?”

 

 


	2. Complication

 Gaby

 

 

He’d rarely heard them come in, he tells her. His perception had dulled there, numbed by contact damage to his ears and his eyes often too swollen to see. He would shut down the moment they shoved him back into his cell, snatching sleep in ten minute bursts when his interrogators changed shifts. Then they’d yank him out again, and again, and again.  
  
But he hadn’t given them anything, he says. He hadn’t told them a thing.  
  
Gaby has to force herself not to stare at him. She knows the risks of their work, has seen what Illya can do to other men, but until now she believed him to be untouchable. Bones she believed unbreakable are fractured, handsome cartilage has been bent and skewed. One still swollen and the other brow cut to pieces, his eyes have only upset her since the moment she found him. The damage and the hurt she still sees in them, underneath...  
  
She scolds herself for it, but the urge to brush the bridge of his nose and gently touch his ears is visceral. She can barely hold herself back from getting her hands on the damage. It’s her mechanic’s rage. As with the cars she used to tend to, she wishes she had been there to foresee the mistreatment, to scold him for allowing this to happen.  
  
She wishes for a lot of things.  
  
Then Illya tells her the precise dimensions of the corridor he’d taken a hundred times, from his cell to the interrogation room, though surely he knows she’d taken that same corridor to find him. Gaby supposes he just wants it to be known, so dutifully she writes it down. She doesn’t want to stop him. He wants to get it all out. She hadn’t misheard the shouting in his sleep this morning, before she had to leave him again. The nurse had warned her, and so had Waverly, of the night terrors and the harm it could do to his broken bones. If he lets it all out now, perhaps he’ll sleep better.

But it takes remarkable determination to keep writing.

Illya is answering her questions methodically and without heart. They had tossed him into the car, three of them, at eleven o’clock at night. No, he didn’t get a good look at them. He’d been rendered unconscious by some sort of toxin, and was wearing his work clothes at the time but his shoes were off. That note had been delivered with a certain strain. Gaby couldn’t see why it would matter, having his shoes off in his own home, but he’d said it with vehemence, as if walking around in his socks had been the lone cause for being ambushed by THRUSH enforcers, and that he ought to have known better.  
  
She is ready to tell him that it’s ridiculous, but he stops her by pouring them both more vodka. Gaby raises a brow at him, and he looks back humourlessly.  
  
And he continues.  
  
Gaby daren’t look at what she has written so far. It’s when Illya calmly details the heinous conditions of his cell that Gaby has to pour a last drink for herself.  
  
“We do not have to go on,” Illya says.  
  
Gaby looks up. At her tiny table with the pendant light above, the world had shrunk to the familiar rumble of Illya’s voice and the horrible things coming out of it. Her flat only just begins to feel too quiet.  
  
His report is concise. Professional. There is no reason to stop. No reason beyond the tightening grip on her pen, threatening to snap the little Bic into pieces. That she has been instructed to stay here with him tonight, rather than finish what THRUSH had started, continues to boil her blood. The ringleaders of the compound have been reined in, interrogated, sentenced – a success, on paper, but Gaby has been cheated. By being taken out the operation they’ve practically gotten away with it. She should be taking THRUSH to pieces. She wants to look into the eyes of the people who did this, and certainly she wants to frighten them. More than anything, she wants put her pinpoint focus to good use, now that Illya is back. Now that he is safe, she can ensure THRUSH’s operation will never be safe again. In fact she has half a mind to storm down to HQ with Illya’s report tonight. Show Waverly how being ‘too close’ to an operation, to an agent, a partner, can prove essential after all.  
  
But she won’t leave. Not yet. First, she wants to get this out of him. Steadily. Gently, because he needs to.  
  
His wrist looks so bare without his watch.  
  
“No,” she tells him, nodding. “We can. If you want to.”  
  
So he does.

  
  
  
  
It’s one o’clock in the morning when he starts to falter and he excuses himself to get ready for bed.  
  
In her bed, alone, Gaby sleeps.  
  
There, Solo is at her back and shooting at somebody she can’t see. Gaby is holding the blowtorch and its flame is cutting through the vault door like a knife through butter — only, no matter how many times she tries, the seam only seals back up, the metal oozing upward and destroying the progress she’s made. Illya is in there. She can’t see him, or hear him, but he’s in there. She can feel him. He’s in there but she can’t get in.  
  
This time he’s saying her name.  
  
Her cheeks are hot with tears, and when Gaby puts her hand through the melting metal her hand melts too, painless and wet and useless, and then her arm, and her torso goes with it, while her heart in the middle keeps beating faster and faster and faster until it’s the last thing left on the compound’s cold, hard floor.  
  
“Gaby.”  
  
Her eyes snap open. There’s someone there. Cold light forms around the substantial size of him. Her bedroom is tinted by the street-facing windows of her living room, even with the curtains obediently drawn.  
  
Illya remains in the doorway. His arm plaster is still cast at a precise ninety degrees, as if permanently inviting her for a walk.  
  
Gaby huffs. Her entire body is clammy with sweat, shivery cold for kicking the covers off. She pulls the sheets back up to her chest and scoots up to sit against the pillows.  
  
When she does no more than stare at him, he hesitates. “You called me in.”  
  
Had she? With Illya she may as well be hooked up to a polygraph. Holding his gaze is easy, but her temples are damp and her throat, sure enough, is dry and tight. She could lie, but he can always tell. She’d called him in her sleep and here he is. Months ago, before the agreement, he would have stroked her back and let her listen to his chest to help her fall asleep again. Gaby wonders how long he deliberated over getting up, having heard her shout his name from her bedroom in the middle of the night. How much effort it must have taken to get up off that floor and get here in time. He is clearly doubting himself the longer he goes without instruction.  
  
He waits for her.  
  
“Then come in,” she says.  
  
Illya closes the door softly behind him. “A nightmare,” he offers.  
  
_Another_ , she could say. Two months straight there have been nightmares. Gaby turns on her bedside lamp and rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Mm,” she says, and nothing else.  
  
Illya knows how to get into her bed. He knows the dimensions of her bedroom just as well as he knows the compound’s corridor, but he lowers to sit on the end of her mattress instead. His good hand steadies him, planted just a few inches from her foot under the sheets.

He turns to look at her properly.  
  
“Well? Are you going to get in?” she says, resenting him for making her ask.  
  
“Do you want me to?”  
  
She resents that even more, so she only looks at him flatly.  
  
He could tell her off for this, for breaking the rules, but he won’t. And he doesn’t. He only rises again, with poorly concealed difficulty, to round the end of the bed and come to the side she never sleeps on anymore.  
  
“You’ve put your shoes back on,” Gaby notes.  
  
He doesn’t explain. When he sits on his side of the bed, Gaby watches his back as he reaches down to ease off his boots one-handed, place each one neatly on the floor. She peels back the top blanket for him and he shifts to lie on top of the duvet, slowly, fully dressed. He leaves the blanket to fall however it wants, but he can’t hide the relief in his body for settling down somewhere soft, allowing himself a small sigh and for his head to tip back against the headboard.

He was an idiot to reject the bed in the first place. Surely it has set back his healing. If it weren’t for his stubbornness, and if she weren’t so afraid of this moment only two days ago, she would have pushed harder for it.  
  
With the door closed and the lamp on, and the bed heavier than before, it feels so normal. Having him here is different to wondering about it. Suddenly it is easy. There has never been a promise that Illya hasn’t kept; he honours everything she asks of him, and this will be no different. He won’t touch her. Not unless she touches him. They still have an agreement. It’s like a ribbon, such a thin boundary, and only she can wield the scissors.  
  
Even while resting his eyes he must feel her staring at him, so he rolls his head to face her. “Do you want to talk about it?”  
  
He’s already nodding off, nearly sat upright, and his voice is slurred with it. He needs to rest. She should give him that, at least.  
  
“I want to go to sleep,” she tells him.  
  
“Hmm,” he agrees, low and rumbling. “Good idea.”  
  
Gaby turns off the lamp.  
  
But in the dark she could very easily talk about a lot of things with him.  
  
The dark offers a good deal of protection from Illya Kuryakin and that earnest, waiting gaze of his. He is the only one to ever shake her confidence in lying. Without him looking at her, blurting out everything she didn’t truly believe would be a breeze. She could deny all her doubts, because in the dark he wouldn’t be able to read her in the way he always has. She could tell him that she doesn’t want him to stroke her back or let her listen to his chest again, because in the dark he couldn’t call her bluff. Now that he can’t look at her, she could tell him without a shake in her voice that they made the right choice. And she could lay it all out like Illya would; logically, precisely, with all the heart squashed down. She could tell him that laying this to rest is for the good of the agency, the team. After all, the work is only getting harder and they are still so different. She could tell him all the ways they are impossible, and why it should matter to him, though he’d nearly shouted last time she tried that it never would. In the dark he wouldn’t shout, and in the dark she wouldn’t shout louder. She could tell him to stop waiting, and to look for—  
  
No.  
  
She wouldn’t do that.  
  
When Illya’s breathing levels out with sleep, and she is still wide awake, Gaby could whisper that she’s glad he’s even breathing at all.  
  
But she doesn’t.

 

 

It’s unusually light for a winter morning, streaming sun through the yellow cast of Gaby’s bedroom curtains and over her cheeks. She sighs as she basks in the weak warmth, eyes closed, and waits for her alarm clock to no doubt shove her awake in only a few moments, as it all too often does.  
  
It takes a moment to pinpoint what’s wrong. The mattress is cool and slack behind her.  
  
He’s gone.  
  
Gaby shoots up, tosses back the duvet to find only clean white sheets and not a trace of him. She elbows her way to the other side of the bed, finds his boots are gone too.  
  
She gets up. Light headed. Her pace to her door is purposefully steady, quiet, holding herself back by a string while her feet threaten to hurry ahead of her. Panic is useless. Panic is a detriment. First she will call HQ, then she will call Napoleon, and then she will check for tells. In theory, she has been prepared for this. In theory she has been trained to handle it.

When Gaby reaches her bedroom door she pries it open discreetly, peers out, listens hard.  
  
Her bath is running and the bathroom door to her hallway is wide open.  
  
Gaby stubbornly swallows her embarrassment. She breathes out and waits for a moment, in case he’d heard her haste, and then she continues down her own hallway as if nothing is amiss. When she passes the open bathroom door she looks in with disinterest.  
  
Illya is standing by the bath and reading her shampoo bottle.  
  
“Good morning,” she says evenly.  
  
He sets the bottle back down. “Good morning.”  
  
“You don’t know how to close the door?”  
  
His lips purse. She wonders if he knows his hair is mussed, that his eyes are still heavy with a good night’s sleep. His bruising looks better today, his eye less swollen. She makes a mental note to reapply that calamine lotion, if he wants it. She’d liked doing that. There’s still a powdery pink finish to his temple since the last one.  
  
“I need to take this off,” he says, and cocks his head to the tight, muscle-round shoulder of his undershirt. “I would— I could do this, but the cast, this dressing… I have tried.”  
  
“You want me to help.”  
  
He looks at her carefully, reluctant. “Yes.”  
  
Gaby nods once, pressing a smile. She steps around the socks and the boots and the sling he has managed to shed, and she takes to the hem of his undershirt. Illya ducks to get within her reach so she pulls it up, lets him free his good arm so he can hold onto the dressing on his brow, then guides the rest over his head. She manoeuvres it down his shoulder, his cast, and off his right hand until she’s holding it. It’s warm and soft. It smells like him. Feels like he used to feel.

She gives it back.  
  
Illya keeps his cast up with typical discipline, and Gaby stares at the seam where his bicep disappears into white plaster. She follows the curve to the centre of his chest and down, where his time in the hospital has restored some of the mass he’d lost and he looks almost like he used to. More bruises. A new scar on his rib cage, red but healing. But just as big. Just as heavy, just as warm.  
  
His silence is enough to break her gaze. Flicking a glance up at him, his blue eyes are soft but wounded from the inside out. There’s that urge again — the urge to reach out and touch the cuts and swelling, like she could get ahold of them and put him right again, like feeling out a scratch in perfect paint, right down to the bodywork and all the damage underneath. Like she could fix it for him. Undo everything.  
  
“What's wrong?” he asks, so low she hardly hears him. He has stepped closer, or she has, and his bare chest is radiating open warmth. It would be so easy to rest her cheek there, have him pull her close and hold her, steady and secure, like he used to.  
  
“Gaby,” he says, gentle.  
  
The shrill of her alarm clock rattles away in her bedroom.  
  
Gaby smiles thinly at the floor and steps out into her hall. “Well," she says. "I’m sure you can handle the rest.”

 

 

A few hours later the telephone on her desk rings, clamouring and insistent. She waits, and so does Illya. After two rings, hanging up, and a fresh call for another three, Gaby deems it safe to return Solo’s call and Illya returns to his chess game.  
  
“ _Good morning, Gaby. Is he there?_ ”  
  
“Of course,” she says, when she means _obviously_. There is little she can say during this call —one she has been expecting for days— without Illya flaring up in alarm, so she keeps it nondescript.  
  
“ _Is he listening?_ ”  
  
Gaby looks into her compact mirror, left open on her desk since her paperwork last night. She sits down and angles it again, finally lands back on Illya sitting on her settee and frowning at his chess board. His blond hair is still bath-damp, drying naturally — Solo, much to Illya’s quiet distress, hadn’t packed his Brilliantine. Gaby has decided that the oversight was intentional, and had much to do with her having complimented Illya’s hair without it, _once_ , in Solo’s company.  
  
“ _Gaby?_ ”  
  
“No,” she answers him.  
  
“ _I think it’s best we keep this little rendezvous to ourselves,_ ” Solo drawls. “ _A sensitive situation, you understand. Sneaking out in the middle of the night, whispering down the telephone. We wouldn’t want him to get jealous_.”  
  
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”  
  
“ _Let me have this_ ,"says Napoleon. “ _I’m doing you a favour tonight_.”  
  
“I’m beginning to regret that.”  
  
_“Why don’t you take the phone to another room?_ ”  
  
Illya’s typically pin sharp hearing is either truly irreparable or he’s proving more faithful than she’d thought him capable of. His curiosity must be insatiable, but here he is abstaining, though he must know she has something to hide. He always knows. No stifling, she’d said. No intruding, no eavesdropping. No spying.  
  
He isn’t listening. She thinks that he wouldn’t even if he could.  
  
With the handset to her ear she picks up the phone and takes it with her to her bedroom, the long cord kinking around her ankles like a snake as she tugs it along.  
  
She feels like a snake, leaving Illya there. She feels his blue eyes like searchlights on her back as she closes her door behind her.

 

When Gaby returns Illya doesn’t look up from his chess set. She expects to see demand in him, insistence that she tell him what he’d missed, or accusation after listening from behind her bedroom door, but there isn’t any. He hadn’t listened. He really is leaving her alone, just like she asked.

So why does that bother her?  
  
“That was Solo,” Gaby offers.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“We’re working tonight. I won’t be back until tomorrow.”  
  
“Oh,” Illya says, peering up at her. Gaby watches as he flexes his fingers, stretches his good hand. “Yes, of course. You should go.”  
  
“I’m going to.”  
  
Illya nods shortly and leans back over his chess game.  
  
Gaby, quite lost in her own hallway, escapes to get changed.

 

 

“You’re sure about this.”  
  
Gaby pulls into an unlit delivery bay, where debris from the blast still litters the asphalt yard of the compound. The former gasworks is as foreboding as it had been the night they’d rescued Illya, though every threat inside has been neutralised. But tonight her pulse is steady, determined, rather than rattling around with vengeful adrenaline.  
  
Tonight she is looking for something else.  
  
“In his report, Illya said something else about an inventory office on the east wing. I’m going to have a look there. You can do what you want.”  
  
Napoleon gives her a look of his own. He finishes twisting the suppressor to the end of his pistol. “And how is he?”  
  
“Do you care? Or are you just being nosy?”  
  
“Both. Sincerely.”  
  
Gaby supposes that he wouldn’t be here on his own time if he didn’t care at all. Reaching over to open the glove box, she hums dully. “He’s eating well. Sleeping better.”  
  
“ _Is_ he?”  
  
She snaps her gloves on. “Yes.”  
  
“And are you?”  
  
“Am I what?”  
  
“Sleeping well.”  
  
She glances at him and scoffs. “The agreement is final, Solo. Nothing has happened, and nothing will.”  
  
“And I’m sorry to hear it, but that’s not what I meant.”  
  
They both know that’s not true, but the earnest little curl of Napoleon’s smile is still as disarming as ever. Gaby gives him a withering look anyway, then reaches behind her to take the camera case off the back seat. She may have hidden the blue Trigère coat away in storage, still too raw a reminder of Paris, but she’d kept the suede camera strap Illya gave her before that same outbound flight. It sits snug around the high neckline of her tac shirt, as warm as a palm.  
  
“A few night terrors,” she admits.  
  
“You’ll have your old life back before you know it,” Napoleon reminds her, and she would believe it to be cheery assurance if she didn’t know Napoleon Solo as well as she does. From him, it’s an ultimatum.  
  
In the moonlit cab of her borrowed car, she squints at him. “What do you know?”  
  
Napoleon looks her over as if he’s considering a gamble. “Only that they’ve freed up a safe house before schedule. An impressive one, too. A gymnasium in the basement, high security. If you want him out by morning? Well, now there’s somewhere for him to go. I’m sure you’d like to get him out of your hair, such close quarters and all...”  
  
She’d dropped his eye half way through the news, and she doesn’t think she can meet it again without showing him all her cards. How can her heart sink and flicker high in her chest all at once? She takes a steady breath — this is good. This is good news. She can have him out and everything will be back to normal. “That’s good.”  
  
“Is it?”  
  
“Where?” she asks, because she should. “Where is it?”  
  
“Close by.” He doesn’t disclose more because he knows Gaby very well, and he knows that his answer doesn’t matter. He knows that she isn’t asking in earnest but he, tonight, perhaps still flattered to be asked for help, is not going to challenge her on it. Gaby has perfected her poker face since Illya had been confirmed MIA and she hasn’t taken it off since, but Solo is a master of reading between the lines. Tonight he only chooses not to voice it. “You should let him know.”  
  
“I will,” she says.  
  
She won’t.  
  
Solo gives her an encouraging little smile and opens the passenger door. “Shall we?”  
  
“Look for it,” Gaby tells him. She leaves her heart inside the car. “We’re not going back without it.”

 

She finds it first.  
  
A metallic disk in a scatter of rubble, engulfed by countless more confiscated items stored in the compound’s inventory office. She shines her torch on it for a while longer, not quite believing it for herself.  
  
Gaby holds her camera from swinging as she ducks down, pinches and pulls. With a gritty slide it’s dragged out and, even with the broken glass and the significant dint in the back, she’d recognise it anywhere.

“Found you,” Gaby murmurs, as if it’s him, and she slips it into the little black pouch on her belt.

 

  
  
The morning is just beginning when she drops Solo off, and the sun is gold and streaking between the skyscrapers in a way she rarely sees. She doesn’t go home right away. Wrapping her trench coat around her tactical garb, she has two destinations in mind. The bakery is open first. She’s starving and they have the jam crowns Illya likes, so she buys one for him too.  
  
The second destination is opening up very soon. A pretty girl with a broom is sweeping the doorway with the shutters half lowered, and is hesitating to duck back inside while Gaby stands there, waiting.  
  
When the girl catches her eye for the fourth time, Gaby takes pity.  
  
“Could you help me with this?” Gaby asks, at last, and fishes Illya’s watch from her pocket.  
  
The girl puts down her broom to come and take a look.

 

 

It takes two hours. She’s invited to go shopping, to come back later, but she daren’t leave it there. Gaby sits at the counter on the shopkeeper’s stool and chats with the girl, an apprentice, while studying the workings of Illya’s father’s watch as it’s taken to hundreds of pieces, only to be put back together again.  
  
The apprentice installs the new back, a shiny stainless steel, as close to the original as they had. Would she like it engraved?  
  
No, Gaby says. She’d like it just as it was.

 

  
  
  
She’s excited to get home.  
  
The watch is in her coat pocket, pinched between her two fingers and ticking away like a heartbeat. Gaby doesn’t think about how she ought to feel, only feels it. This will mean a lot to him. This will untangle a lot of crossed wires. A peace offering, a gesture of good will. She will give him his watch, and he will leave, and then everything will be back to normal. Everything.  
  
When Gaby finds him on the settee, resting his cheek in his palm and drifting off with a deep furrow on his bandaged brow, all that certainty ceases.  
  
Taking off of her coat, Gaby lets the door gently click behind her.  
  
Of course Illya snaps awake immediately. He blinks again in the way he thinks disguises his just being asleep. His stretch all over is languid and broad, his expression confused as he adjusts his cast on his stomach.  
  
Seeing him, all her planning for what to do and what to say skids to a halt. The watch is in her pocket but she can’t take it out. Solo’s news of the prepared accommodation reels in her head like that same black snake, but she can’t take that out either.  
  
“Du bist zu Hause,” he greets, relieved, and the sleepy rasp of his voice seals her pockets and her mouth once and for all. “How did it go?”  
  
Gaby holds her head up. Maybe Solo will tell Illya the news, or Waverly will call, and she won’t have to tell him at all. The watch can wait. It can all wait until she has a proper explanation for why she’d left in the middle of the night for him, to then stare for two hours at the bones of his father’s watch she’d spent three hours looking for, all while insisting that none of this is personal.  
  
Much of their work is a waiting game. Illya is used to it. There’s no need to hurry. There’s no sense babbling headlong into it... If Illya stays another night, she’ll have time to make up a _proper_ reason for breaking all the rules, and then... Yes. Normal.   
  
“You don’t have to wait up for me,” she tells him. “I’m going to come back to my own flat.”  
  
“I did not want to invite myself into your bed.”  
  
Gaby, when she recovers, scoffs. She hangs up her coat, ensuring the watch is still safely inside, and heads straight for the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth, and perhaps to avoid his eye, too.  
  
“Well, you don’t need my permission. It’s not like I was sleeping in it.” Gaby takes the film canisters from her pockets and hides them behind her toiletries, where Illya would never think to snoop. “How much sleep have you had?”  
  
Apparently resigned to her instruction, Illya comes to the open bathroom door. He meets her eye in the bathroom mirror while her mouth is full of foam.  
  
“Three hours,” he tells her, but he looks like he wants to go on. He looks like there’s a snake in his head too. “Headache.”  
  
Gaby talks through her toothpaste, “Then you should go back to sleep, too. Properly. We have all day and nothing else to do with it.”  
  
“All day.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Here.”  
  
Gaby dips to spit into the sink. “Where else?”  
  
After a long while Illya nods back, once. He drifts away and leaves her in the bathroom alone. Gaby turns back to brushing her teeth, frowning at the floor.   
  
When she’s finished she goes to her room. Illya has already taken off his shoes without prompting, and is squinting discreetly through the sheers at the busy morning commute below. He must be so bored here. Confined to barracks.  
  
“Get in,” Gaby murmurs, and starts to take off her tactical gear. Behind her she can hear Illya’s belt being unbuckled, and his trousers being neatly folded and set on the floor, too, as if he daren’t touch anything but the carpet.  
  
Gaby doesn’t know where it’s coming from but she wants to tell him off. He should have been in bed when she got home. She can’t be secretive with him around. She wanted to get into bed without disturbing him, not to face him after a night of work she really oughtn’t be doing — now he can see her, and so he can read her, and surely he’ll find out where she’s been. Surely he’ll find out what she knows.  
  
But there’s something else. Something about him is closed up tonight, like he is lying too.  
  
Gaby hears him lifting the blanket and the duvet beneath it as he folds into her bed. She listens for, and hears, his satisfied sigh for being back in the place she knows he’d once found so comforting.

She wonders if he’s watching her.  
  
Gaby takes her pyjamas from her chest of drawers and considers changing in her bathroom. Silly, really. He has seen every inch of her before, and more.  
  
But this is very different. He’ll read everything on her if she undresses here: the watch, the safehouse, the compound. He’ll read it all on her bare skin and surely he’ll demand answers. She hasn’t had enough time to twist them in her favour.  
  
She knows it’s ridiculous. It’s Illya. And this is her bedroom, not his, and he should just keep his promise and not look at her.  
  
First, she goes to her dressing table. First, she has to know.  
  
Gaby peels off her tactical shirt and lays that on the little stool, bending slightly to cover her face with her hair, and she peers into the mirror to find Illya in her bed.  
  
He’s looking. He’s looking at her bared back but he quickly looks away, not because he meets her eyes but because he’s looking, and he shouldn’t.

Or he doesn’t want to.  
  
Fine. Good. Gaby takes off her brassiere as if he isn’t there at all and she slips into her pyjama shirt, buttons it all the way to the top. Off come her black trousers, even her underwear, and she perhaps makes slightly more of a show than necessary to step into the cropped bottoms, but she catches him. He’s not infallible. One moment he’s looking at her bottom and the next he’s glaring at the ceiling, or maybe the heavens, and then he slides down to hide among her pillows and he shuts his eyes, firmly.

That's more like it.

 

 

She isn’t ready to get up yet. She has only managed a few hours, but late morning light is streaming into her bedroom through a gap in her curtains, and Illya is touching her.  
  
At least, the elbow of Illya’s cast is digging into her back. Gaby stares glassily at the weave of her sheets. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t want to wake him up, or let the cast drop too quickly and hurt him. The heavy muscle of his calf is resting in the arch of her foot behind her, somehow laced together in the middle of the night. It upsets her more than she could have anticipated. It makes her whole chest ache.  
  
Gaby peers over her shoulder. That’s worse. He’s sound asleep, obediently on his back as the doctor ordered and breathing deeply, peacefully. He hasn’t shaved since he’d left the hospital. She could hold his cast still and roll over, if she dared, to rasp over his jaw with her palm like she used to. Back when he’d rub roughly into her neck with it just to make her squeak.  
  
Stop.  
  
She slowly slides her foot out from under him. Illya makes a noise in his sleep and rubs his brow on his pillow, the bandage proving useless now, and brings his good arm up to rest behind his head.  
  
He’s still asleep. Gaby watches, though she shouldn’t — she knows she shouldn’t — but like a roaring fire in a very dark forest she just can’t look away. He looks so warm, and so heavy. There’s a sheen to his skin that comes with being too hot in bed, on his cheekbones and his forehead. His chest would look the same under that snug t-shirt, taut from shoulder to shoulder. She shouldn’t, she’s told herself not to many times before, but she remembers having him all sweaty and worn out in this same bed. How _strong_ he’d been. Cursing and groaning and covering her from top to toe, kisses hungry and those arms, unbroken, wrapping under and around her, lifting her bare hips to meet every deep roll of his own.  
  
She gets up.

 

  
He taught her how to do this. The caustic, vinegary stench of chemicals fills her little bathroom, the safelight’s dim red hue settling dully on all the tiles.  
  
Strange how the only thing to take her mind off Illya relies on another darkroom.  
  
Gaby carefully peels back another print in its bath with the tweezers, squints to see another photograph of the compound’s records finally darkening. Solo had taken the documents straight to HQ this morning, but a copy of her own, taken during their work last night, wouldn’t hurt. If they want to exclude her from the investigation she’ll get her own answers. She’d dispose of it securely once the investigation was all over, of course. Just... At the time, she thought Illya might like to see them for himself. Now she only wants to hide from him as much as she can of that place and pretend that none of this had ever happened. None of it at all.  
  
The darkroom at HQ was the last place she’d been... intimate with him. A slip up, a tear in their agreement only three weeks after it was made. Only a month before he was taken.  
  
But sealed in that little corner of HQ, windowless, the door closed, the red light dimmed to an ember, nobody else would know. In their work their mistakes are detrimental to the rest of the world. Alone, it’s only theirs.  
  
So when he’d seized her by the waist to perch her on the worktop and hike up her skirt, kiss her roughly, unbuckle his belt and lean into her neck to breathe that this is a bad idea, she did believe him, but it didn’t matter at all. She had only missed the abundance of him. Missed having him everywhere.  
  
Perhaps she should have stopped when he’d first groaned her name in her ear, or when he’d muttered his gratitude between kisses, his sorries and his thank yous, or when his hands gripped harder than they ever had. Should have stopped when he’d bruised her thigh with four fingers and a thumb, had cupped her head to protect it from the high shelves of acids, dishes, and pipettes. Stopped when he grunted and hung his head and banged his kneecap on the cupboard door. When she’d laughed. When his kisses grew deep, and hungry, and between each one she’d looked him in the eyes for long enough to know that he knew – he knew what he was doing, and so did she, and they both wanted every part of it. So why can’t they? Why can’t they—  
  
“Gaby.”  
  
Gaby elbows a bottle of acetic acid into the bathtub. She curses and catches it with both hands. Behind her the hall light is off and door is still closed but Illya is certainly looming behind it. Silent, knowing. She can see his shadow under the door.  
  
“What are you doing?” she demands.  
  
“I could ask you the same question.”  
  
Gaby straightens her pyjama shirt. She doesn’t want him to come in. Surrounded by the evidence of just how unprofessional a reaction she has had to this whole affair is... Well. She ought to have left this to working hours and detach herself completely. She’d made him promise as much to her, months ago. Now here she is, on her knees in front of her own bathtub and solving the mystery of his disappearance, even while all the answers have been made clear and he is safely asleep in her bed.  
  
At least, he was.  
  
“Well I’ve finished now.”  
  
Illya opens the door by a crack, a little more when she doesn’t slam it shut again, and slips inside. He closes the door to the dark hall behind him and surveys the bathroom while Gaby pretends to get on with her work unperturbed.  
  
“We have technicians for this,” he reminds her.  
  
“This is personal.”  
  
From the corner of her eye she sees Illya leaning in, inspecting the prints already hanging from the shower rail. Photographs of his cell, blueprints of the compound and its planned expansion. The spiked barricades and the specimen chambers, the thumb screws and film projectors and floodlit interrogation rooms. Gaby finds herself bristling for an outburst. Whatever rebuke is surely running through his mind, something is keeping it inside him.

He picks up a film canister from the counter. “You should not have taken these from HQ. This is confidential material.”  
  
“They’re mine. I took the photographs myself.”  
  
He does look at her then. “You returned to the compound.”  
  
Gaby does her best not to swallow. “Yes.”  
  
After a long and measuring look, Illya hums, satisfied with her response. He puts the canister back down carefully.  
  
“Nobody saw us,” she explains.  
  
“Us?” he asks.  
  
“Solo and me.”  
  
Illya nods. He peers down at the bath full of trays and vinegar solution. He looks like he’ll burn a hole through the prints with his glare alone. The photographs of the aftermath had horrified her enough... She can’t imagine what he sees.   
  
Still kneeling by the bath, Gaby touches his forearm. She has to. “I asked him to go.”  
  
“Yes. Why?”  
  
She can’t tell him that. She doesn’t have the courage, yet, to tell him how revenge has been taken from her. That this is all she can do. How can she tell him that she needs revenge at all? Isn't this all her idea, this restraint? This severing of her ties to him? All of this, surely, proves she's afraid of cutting that ribbon cleanly in two. Not yet. Not yet. She needs more time yet.

She lets go of his arm. “Work.”  
  
A poor cover. Gaby readies for his accusation. For him to tell her that their ‘agreement’ is a fallacy. She breaks agency protocol, endangers herself, lies to him, while he’s expected to keep up his half of the agreement absolutely.  
  
“You could have been taken,” he says.  
  
He isn’t looking at her, but at all the trays in the bath, all the evidence of her search for something she hasn’t been told to look for.  
  
But she had.  
  
“They’re all gone, Illya. Solo was with me.” This doesn’t seem to console him one bit. “What, you don’t trust me?”  
  
Illya finally drags his gaze from the prints and back to her, blue eyes turned colourless in the strange red light. Of all the looks she has ever received from Illya Kuryakin, this is the first time she has witnessed disappointment. It's worse, far worse, than anger. “Do not do this again. Not for me.”  
  
“Who says it’s for you?”  
  
Gaby turns on him, fishes another print from its rinse to peg it up on the line. An area map, plagued by the black bird emblem they’ve come to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned!!! There may EVEN be some fun soon! These two? Having a good time?? You'll have to take my word for it xxx


	3. Negotiation

 

  
Gaby lets the top sheet fall back over the finished report, proofread and signed poorly by Illya's left hand. She taps it on the table and shuffles it neatly into a manila folder. It’s only late morning, yet Illya already seems so tired. Returning to that place and all that happened to him there has taken the day out of him. He's dull-eyed, slow, sullen. He rolls his neck, stretches his working arm. When the toaster pops, the only sound besides the taxis and buses beading through the streets below, he gets up to go to her kitchen.

Illya had decided to conclude his report at the drive to the hospital, after she and Napoleon had retrieved him. All recalled so stoically, professionally, as though they could have been anybody.

She doesn’t know what else she expected. Certainly not details of his current living situation.

Gaby sneaks a glance at him through the serving hatch beside her table. His back and his shoulders. He has to stoop slightly to work at her counter. He doesn’t need to search for where she keeps the butter knife. He already knows.

The night they found him is still a blur to her. She recalls her racing pulse, and Solo’s calm repetition, relaying the extraction plan she’d helped come up with and assuring her that they’ll get him. That they’ll get THRUSH, too, or at least the division responsible for this whole affair. She’d driven on a track, autopilot, while for the first time she’d allowed herself to picture what it might be like to have Illya back again. Really back. What she might say, or do, or be unable to stop herself from doing — how hard it was going to be not to hold onto him very tightly, once he was.

She shakes it off. It’s over. His report is finished, and there is no need to keep him here any longer. Today she will tell him about his accommodation, give him his watch, and she’ll drive him to his new building. On Monday he will return to HQ in his sling, where he’ll have a girl to type for him, bring him his coffee, fetch his files until he’s fighting fit again. She knows a number who’ll jump at the chance.

Gaby blinks hard. Time to get it over with. She locks the manila folder in her desk drawer on her way to the kitchen to join him.

There, Illya is still struggling with the butter dish one-handed, his toast sliding around his plate.

“All done,” Gaby prompts, when he barely acknowledges her arrival. She reaches over and holds his toast still by the edges. “Let’s go out.”

She can practically hear the roll of his gaze to her. “Out?”

“To celebrate. We could walk around the block.”

Illya returns to his buttering, minding her fingers. “That is not good idea.”

“Never stopped us before,” she murmurs. Illya admonishes her with just a look. It was a careless thing to say. Perhaps she’s feeling careless. Like she has nothing to lose anymore. “Half an hour. You need some sunlight or you’ll start to wilt.”

“I am a wanted man.”

“Then we’ll disguise you. You’ll have a gun. I will have a gun.”

“No. You are welcome to go outside. I will stay here, open a window.”

“No.” Gaby drags the plate across the counter and out of his reach. “I want you to come with me.”

“Not happening.”

“Oh,” Gaby says, and she nods gravely. Illya frowns in suspicion as she surrenders his toast back to him without a fight. “You’re scared. That’s fine.”

“No.”

She would be scared. She wouldn’t blame him one bit for refusing. But the fresh air would be good for him. She feels like she’s keeping him in a petri dish, cooped up in this flat. It’s surely a trap to him. That’s what this is. She’s trapping him here, isn’t she? She wouldn’t feel this way if she’d told him about the apartment last night. If he’d left already, as he should have…

Now she has to go out, whether he comes with her or not.

Gaby reaches around him to take her keys from the counter. “Fine. I’ll go by myself.”

That gets him. “Now?”

“Why not? It’s not like there’s anything else to do around here.”

That’s a lie. Now that they’ve finished his report they could stumble over one another, and dwell, and crawl the walls in search of something to do. And with every hour the flat would close in, smaller and tighter, until they’d inevitably converge like two very stubborn, frigid icebergs.

And who knows what could happen then?

Seemingly considering this for himself, Illya rolls his good shoulder and picks up his toast. Cherry jam. She’d bought it for him. He takes a loud, miserable bite, and Gaby knows then that she has won. “Ten minutes.”

Gaby goes to look for his hat.

 

 

 

Ten minute pass, fifteen, and Illya is still stalking alongside her in his lowered cap, his cast stuffed inside his jacket. Hiding. Their breath curls in wisps with the chill. It's noon, and the winter sun is a pale disk that scudders in and out of heavy cloud with no warmth at all.

Gaby tucks her coat closer. She’s carrying, both a gun in the lining and his watch in her pocket, though she really should be wearing the blue Trigère on a cold day like today. The one he'd had altered for her, tailored to her body and to her Walther PPK, that sunny spring day in Paris. How would he react if she were to take it out of storage, wear it again, as if no time had passed at all? What would it say about her, that surrender? _There_ , it might say. _I can give up a little bit. Your turn._

They have looped her street countless times by now, pacing like caged tigers. Illya won’t walk further. If she ventures past the end of her block he only turns on his heel and starts to walk back. Gaby, huffing and bemoaning him, follows. They take the same path again and again, only bothering to keep up with his sulking because she’s relieved he’d left the flat at all.

He has checked his bare wrist twice since leaving the flat, but it isn’t to hurry her. Had he been wearing his watch it would only have brought him comfort; something to keep an eye on, to take his mind off anybody out here keeping their eye on him.

Now she’ll give him his watch back. Now. Gaby feels around her pocket to pinch it, thumbing the rivet of the dial. It's nearly numb through the leather of her gloves. When she knows he’s distracted by the traffic, she peers up to measure his mood. Does he need it? Does he want it now? Perhaps she could give it back to him over dinner tonight. It would be safer to drive him home at night… her car would be less recognisable, less traceable, if anybody were to be looking out for it.

Gaby watches her shoes on the pavement as she tries to keep up.

She can give it to him tomorrow. Tomorrow she will be ready for him to go.

The changeable winter sun is strong enough to squint into when Gaby turns around, discovering that Illya has stopped several paces behind her.

“What?” she asks, frowning into the light. She lifts her hand to shield the sun. Illya glances covertly across the street before he comes closer, and then his shoulders are casting her completely in shade. For a moment she fears he’s seen something, someone, but he shakes his head at her wide, attentive eyes and she can relax. Or so she thinks.

“This... investigating,” he says, grimly. The admonishing look he’s wearing never used to last very long, but he won’t bend under her teasing today. Today he is serious, and she doesn’t feel like playing with him when he’s as sombre as this. When she knows that it matters. “I want it to stop.”

Unprepared, Gaby scoffs. “My investigating?”

“Your photographs. Your work with Solo.”

“What of it?” Gaby says. She steers around him to keep walking.

Illya stops her, his whole palm firm and familiar around her coat sleeve. His watch is in that pocket. Gaby flits a glance down at his grip, and back up at him, but he holds on.

“Why did you do it?” he asks. Gaby’s mouth goes dry. “Why did you go back to the compound?”

“For work,” she recites easily.

Illya shakes his head. “No. This was not sanctioned by HQ.”

“How do you know? You’re still in the dark, Illya, just like me.”

A muscle in his jaw tenses. The wind blows Gaby’s hair into her eyes and she shoves it away with a gloved hand. She stares him out and, when she proves she won’t give in, Illya lets go of her arm.

“Solo called your flat, after you had taken him home,” Illya discloses. “Before you came back from the compound that night. He said that going back there was your idea.”

Gaby scoffs again, quick, but the betrayal is tender. She’d trusted Napoleon not to tell him. She hadn’t asked, but he should have _known_. “He told you that?”

“He told me where you had been in case you did not come home.”

“In case something happened.”

“Yes.”

Gaby nods acidly and props her hands on her hips. Her heart is restless, like it could fly out of her in search of somewhere stronger. “What else did he tell you?”

Illya’s resolve wavers the longer she waits for his rebuttal. Whatever he has, if he has anything at all, is locked down deep. “Nothing. He would not give me anything else.”

Gaby watches him carefully for a lie, but he doesn’t buckle. Illya only holds her eye like she’ll run off if he lets go.

“Well,” she mutters. “It was none of your business, anyway.”

“I waited for you,” Illya tells her. “Solo said you would be twenty minutes, the drive from his building to yours. Twenty minutes became forty-five, one hour. What could I think?”

A bus down the street halts noisily to drop off a stream of passengers. As it screeches and hisses, Gaby takes Illya’s sleeve and ducks into the alley’s delivery bay. There she presses her back to the damp brick wall and watches the street. Illya doesn’t. He’s still looking at her, looming, and the intensity of that glare is hot on her cheeks so she soon looks down at her shoes instead.

She only wanted some fresh air. She wanted to give him his watch back.

“I wanted to look for you,” Illya goes on, hushed. “But I waited. I knew you would be angry if I left your flat, came looking for you. You don’t want me to look for you anymore. So I didn’t. I waited. I hoped you would come back. I could do nothing.”

Gaby glowers up at him, accusatory. “No, you were asleep when I came back.”

“No. No, I...” His iciness finally falters. Illya looks at his shoes too, and stubbornly back to her. Soft blue eyes. Hurt. She hasn’t seen that look in so long. The look of a white lie inside him, a misstep in his ever-proper way of doing things. He shakes his head. “I was not asleep. I did not want you to know... Know that I waited up for you.”

“Why not?”

Illya’s lips form a firm line. He won’t give her that. “Why did you return to the compound?” he counters.

For you, she could say, because it’s the truth. She went for him. She wanted to take that place and wring it out, bleach the imprint it has left on all three of them. All Illya can remember of the compound is torture and the dark. All Gaby can remember is finding him on that concrete slab, bruised and broken and looking at her like she was his world, his mother, his woman, all he needed.

He’s looking at her like that now.

How little it would take to pull him all the way down, soothe the worry lines off his injured brow. Kiss him content, like she used to. Gaby reaches determinedly into her pocket for the watch but her hand feels like jelly, the arm that used to tear apart engines and be thrust up _en haut_ is uselessly, pitifully weak.

She gives up.

“We should go back,” she murmurs.

It takes a moment to sink in. After a long, searching stare, darting from her hard eyes to her harder mouth, Illya sighs through his nose. “Forget what happened,” he murmurs, tucking his hat lower. “It is better to forget.”

Gaby’s heart sinks. He’s already turning to walk back to her flat. “Forget what?” she asks, beating him to match his step.

“All of it,” Illya answers stiffly, looking straight ahead. “Your work at the compound. My time there. This conversation, if you want. The report is complete — I would like for us to be partners again. I contact HQ to secure new accommodation, and we return to how things were. Clean slate.”

“How clean?”

He looks like he’ll tell her off for raising the question. Steadily he says, “We maintain the agreement.”

A harsh wind skitters down the street and bites at her heating cheeks. Oh, he’s good. Better than her. Gaby should have known; he’s had enough solitude to get over it, to get over her, to get back to work without a hitch. The KGB’s best… He must be used to separating his heart from his head. Perhaps Gaby only needs to catch up.

“And no more homework,” he goes on, still taking one step for every two of hers. “We put this down, we get through the rest of the week. Everything will be as it was, before.”

“Not everything,” Gaby blurts. It’s less than a mutter but she can’t take it back, so she leaves it to hang in the air behind them. She crosses her arms, she tells herself, for the cold.

Illya tactfully dismisses it with a dull tsk. “We have three more days off duty. We should try to enjoy them.”

That’s it? That’s how he settles this? Gaby’s heart is hammering away, and he can put it down as easily as that? She used to have the colder shoulder, but he’s beaten her to that too.

She’ll be damned if she lets him see her disappointment.

Illya waits for her to nod back, so she does, teeth gritted. It doesn’t take long for hindsight to get a stranglehold. When he turns to check the street, Gaby wishes she had bitten back. Hard. She’s weak for letting him have the last word, for letting him be the strong one. They are equals. They have always been equals, and instead of shaking hands on it she had resorted to pettiness and grumbling, while he'd only straightened up and swallowed down whatever shred of tenderness he might have had left for her.

No doubt it’s all gone now.

 

 

 

Gaby arranges her wet hair to float on the water in front of her. She dips her chin under, and her nose, until she’s peering down the length of her body to her feet, tan against the pink slope of the end of her bath. The vinegar solutions are gone. The red bulb and the trays and the photographs are gone too. If she could take her addled mind off Illya for five minutes, it would be as if he had never been here at all.

Or as if he had never left.

He wants things back to normal? Fine. She can talk to him like they used to, before sex and work and commitment had complicated everything. He has made it easy. After all, she’d called this off because he’d been too much for her — he’d worried too much, cared too deeply, waited too long, touched too gently— and now he was vowing to give her nothing at all. Easy. He’s turned off the tap, and she’s pulled out the stopper. Let it all gurgle down the drain. A clean slate. Sparkling clean. He can care about her only as a partner might; an inconvenience to lose her in action, but not irreplaceable. A fine break time companion, but not fretted over if she decides to skip lunch. She can do impersonal. He can move to the new apartment. She can go on like she did before she met him; alone, independent, unhindered by him being constantly in her shadow, fighting her corner, questioning her mood, and knowing her from root to tip, just as she is. She can do without all of that. Without him. She can—

There’s a light knock high on her bathroom door.

Gaby knuckles at her cheeks, hard. “What do you want?”

“You have moved the aspirin.”

“No I haven’t. It’s in the kitchen.”

“Is not.”

Gaby huffs loud enough for him to hear. She sits up. The tiles echo back her harsh, brisk sniff and the water trickles in musical drips from her chest. She peers up over the counter beside her head. She certainly can’t reach the medicine cabinet from her warm bath, and she tells him so.

When he dawdles at the door for far too long she reminds him, “You know it isn’t locked.”

Another pause. Then the handle turns as slow as a caution and Gaby slides deeper into her bath. She raises a concealing knee out of the water, sinks down until she’s submerged under the sparse layer of bubbles.

Illya, once inside, is very conscious of being so. She watches him, unmoving but for her eyes, as he crosses the length of her bath. He avoids looking at her side of the room completely, choosing instead to open the medicine cabinet and search with very narrow attention. He’s only a foot away, two at the most.

“Well?”

Illya shakes his head tightly. He continues to pick his way through her cosmetics, her useless sleep aids. She watches him look, gathers the bubbles and splays them out. The small ripple of water and the drips from her arms has Illya keeping his eyes firmly, determinedly fixed.

When he finds the little brown bottle at last he studies it, and, after a brief internal hesitance he meets her eyes.

Gaby could blush but she doesn’t. She’s certain the bubbles cover very little; Illya is composed, but he’s not unaffected. She’s as conscious of her lean stomach, the dark hair between her legs, her thigh arced out of the water as he is. But he won’t look — won’t touch — until invited. Instead he only appears distant, wistful, like he’s only looking at her through a shop window.

She won’t deny that his presence affects her here. Her exposed thigh prickles with goosebumps for the open door, the perfume of her soap hazy and soft while the hot steam escapes into her hall. Humiliatingly, her nipples are tightening under his attention and if he spots that then she doesn’t know what she’d do. If they were to swap places, she wouldn’t be able to keep her eyes or her hands to herself.

There’s something about being seen by him again. Something about being separated by only a film of water between her body and his, and the height of him, all the way up there, watching her without taking back what was once his, whenever he wanted. He could have her now, if he wanted. Kneel down, reach in, let her grasp onto his arms and neck with damp, hot hands. She could tell him so. She wouldn’t be angry about today. She’d let him get lost, and she could get lost too. Forget all about it. Every bit.

When it becomes clear he isn’t leaving, despite having found what he was looking for, Gaby finds herself crossing her arm over her blushing chest and sinking lower instead. Fantasy is one thing, but he’d made himself clear this afternoon. She won’t confuse matters more than she already has. And she won’t embarrass herself by asking for him just because she wants him.

With that crossing of her arm, now he only looks at the tiles under his feet.

“Sorry,” he murmurs, the pill bottle in a loose fist by his side.

“No,” Gaby says, before she can stop herself. She hopes her laugh will sound flippant, unbothered, but it comes out quite the opposite. “I— Well, you have seen it all before. Just… Odd. Now.”

Bashfully, Illya nods. “Sorry for this afternoon,” he clarifies.

Oh.

She doesn’t say it back, but he doesn’t go anywhere either.

“You said what had to be said,” she decides.

He gives a stilted, one armed shrug. “It was not easy to say.”

How does he think she felt, giving him that ‘ _for a while_ ’, so long ago? That it had been a piece of cake?

How long had she meant for ‘a while’ to last?

“Well,” Gaby says, soft, and she waits for him to look at her again before raising her concealing arm out of the bath towards him, offering her hand. “Let’s call it what it is. A truce.”

“A truce."

“Between partners,” Gaby explains. “We put all of this behind us. Clean slate, you said. Clean slate it is.”

Illya inspects her outstretched hand, expecting a trick. Perhaps he thinks she’ll tug him into the bath with her, a clatter of limbs and ruined cast and bare skin to trap him once and for all. She wishes she were that powerful. Instead she shakes her hand impatiently at him, eyes flashing, until at last he extends his own. The pill bottle is still curled in his fist, so Gaby tries to cover his broad knuckles with her whole palm and shakes their awkward clasp.

How much fun, touching him again.

He smiles at her, guarded but warmly enough. Gaby lies back and busies herself with arranging her hair down one shoulder, toying with the ends.

Something keeps him lingering in the doorway. “Not real handshake,” he says.

“Not a real truce,” she counters, and she hangs her head back between her shoulders to wet her hair again. When she comes back up, Illya is staring. Openly. The hollow of her throat, her small wet breasts lapped by the water. This time she lets him look for as long as he likes. Lets him look until he catches himself, until he catches her raised brow too. Then he bites the inside of his cheek, tightens his fist, and turns to go.

Alone again, the door closed, Gaby tucks back under the water with a victorious smirk.

 

 

 

When Gaby returns to her living room in fresh pyjamas, Illya is using her telephone and he is lecturing somebody in Russian. The moment he sees her, his expression settles to something utterly unreadable. Gaby knows some Russian, but the most she can make out of his sudden sobriety is his very firm _do svidaniya_ , followed by the shrill clang of the handset as he hangs up.

“What was that?”

“Solo. Is nothing to worry about.”

Gaby tilts her chin. “Then why were you speaking Russian?”

Illya lowers slowly to sit on the edge of the settee. “Cowboy becomes bossy from time to time. I show him who is boss.”

She rolls her eyes, unsurprised by that at least. “Well, what did he have to say for himself? Any news?”

Illya shakes his head. He picks up his chess game from where he left off and stares intently at the board. “No. He wants gossip.”

“Gossip.”

“About us.”

Gaby nods, swallows. Right. “Is that all?”

“Yes, that is all.” He looks up. “You are expecting news from him?”

Gaby turns casually to her drinks cabinet. “No.” _Yes_. She sets down two glasses, pours slightly more vodka than is proper for five o’clock in the evening, and offers one to Illya. “I’m just surprised he hasn’t come here to pick the locks for himself.”

“He would find nothing,” Illya points out, taking the glass from her hand. “Nothing has happened.”

“No,” Gaby says. “And nothing will.”

Illya hums. He tilts his glass on his knee and peers at the contents. “My accommodation will be ready soon.”

After a generous swallow of vodka, Gaby hums convincingly back. It’s fiery and clean, and it flickers hot in her throat as it goes down. “ It will be strange to have my flat back.”

“Strange to leave it.” Before Gaby can answer him, Illya nods at the stereo console beside her. “Turn on your music. You must be tired of quiet, tiptoeing around an injured man all week.”

“I haven’t been _tiptoeing_.”

Illya shrugs his good shoulder, peers up at her. “Then perhaps I am tired of quiet.”

 

 

 

“So our dear Countess chased him all the way down the hall. He jumped out onto the fire escape, which, obviously, was just above my balcony doors—”

“You saw him,”

Gaby scoffs into her glass. “Oh, I saw _everything_.”

“What did you do?”

“I let him in, of course. It was three degrees outside. He would have lost the only weapon in his arsenal to the cold.”

Illya hums knowingly. “He said this.”

“Yes, well. He said it was his finest weapon, but I amended it.”

Illya almost smiles. He finishes his glass and looks for the bottle. Gaby tops him up and gives his thanks a courteous nod. She gets up from the settee to change the record, which has been hissing impatiently for several minutes for something new to play.

“So," Illya says. "This is what happens when I am not here.”

“Oh, no. He’d have done it even if you were.” She kneels to remove the record, slips it back into its sleeve. “He says the countess didn’t leave much room for misunderstanding. Or his dignity.”

“No,” Illya says, with a slight shake of his head. “This is what you do.” He tips his glass to the living room as a whole and to Gaby, still in her pyjamas.

Gaby stops flicking through her collection. She sits back on her bare heels. “Sometimes.”

“I thought of you doing this,” he tells her, “When I was there.” Of all places, he nods to Gaby’s makeshift darkroom, where her photographs of the compound no longer hang, the prints themselves tucked away and everything on them long forgotten since the moment she’d turned on the music.

It had been so easy to fold back down onto the rug and bicker through the evening. Both determined to seem the most unaffected, showing off just how casual one could be in the other’s company, now that their agreement has become a truce.

Gaby had put on her music, taken off her socks, and with Illya stationed safely on the settee she has only been in charge of the drinks. It has been lively, with Gaby lazily dancing from the coffee table to the dry bar, and all of Illya’s disapproving hums, his tuts, his guilty scoffs; he shouldn’t laugh at her jokes at their colleagues' expense, he shouldn’t, but he had. He’d even made some of his own. Between fresh ice cubes tinkling and the topping up of vodka there had been bets and conspiracies made on all they’ve missed at HQ, and what Waverly would say, and how Solo must be coping on his coveted solo missions again.

Under it all, the slight hiss and skip of each record, where the needle had often been dropped too urgently, back when the stereo served solely to muffle all their… noise.

But it’s very quiet now. He’d told her he'd thought of her, then, as she’d spent two months thinking of him. Gaby picks her glass back up with both hands. She’s unsure what else to do with them. He has tightened the atmosphere in the room to something undeniable, like a red ink blot on a piece of paper. They’re both alone, right in the middle, and this is to be addressed. Now.

“I thought of you too,” Gaby admits. Illya is measuring her sceptically, so she proves it. “I had nightmares about you. About where you could be.”

“Your nightmare, two nights ago.”

“You,” she confirms, and tries to direct a glare at him to lighten things up, to have some fun again, but he doesn’t take it. He doesn’t admit to his own night terrors either, the ones she’d been warned about, though they seem to be taking turns with these confessions. Gaby sips her vodka, mumbles the rest, “It wasn’t the worst one I’ve had.”

“You called my name.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“But you did,” Illya says.

“And? What of it?”

He raises a brow at the glass tipped on his thigh. “Perhaps I hoped it was not for nightmares.”

Gaby stares at him. His knees are spread wide, his glass barely touched since she’d last filled it. He hasn’t had enough to not know what he’s doing. He holds her gaze from up on the couch like he has something on her, but there’s no challenge in him at all, no dare. He isn’t looking down on her. He’s inviting her up.

Gaby does stand up. She brings her glass with her and she stands in front of him, taking advantage of a rare occasion in which she is taller. That her heart is rabbiting away in her chest means nothing. He’s pushing the play and she’ll meet it, if that’s what he wants. But if he expects her to break first, he’s in for a surprise.

“Big talk from an injured man,” Gaby commends. “What could you do with a broken arm?”

Illya, droll, looks up at her beneath his brow, all blond lashes and eyes amused. A smile quirks at the corner of his mouth.

“Hm?” she presses, and sips from her glass while bumping his knee with hers. He can’t laugh at her. She won’t let him.

“Whatever you want,” he says. “Chop shop girl.”

Gaby lets out a scoff with no humour at all. That isn’t fair. He can’t say that anymore.

Before she can shove at him again, he blocks her knee with his good hand and stops her. Then he’s brushing the back of her thigh with his fingers, ticklish through her cotton pyjamas.

“What are you doing?”

Illya slows, but he doesn’t stop. Gaby doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want him to stop. Gaby only tilts her knee very slowly, closer, higher, for him to make his next move. They are taking turns, after all...

Before she can fathom it, Illya is gentling her glass from her hand to set it on the side table. Then he returns to pinch the fabric at the back of her thigh and, although Gaby lets out a disapproving little huff, she lets him. So he pulls them down a fraction lower. She lets him do that too. Then she’s helping him, stepping out of the pyjamas entirely and standing back on her own two feet, holding his gaze and moving to stand between his spread knees.

Then he’s thumbing at the bottom button of her pyjama shirt. Gaby races him to start at the top. She can feel her own breath on her fingers, jittery now as she watches him slip the buttons through their holes singlehandedly, quickly, one by one. Illya meets her three quarters of the way up, and she lets him finish off the last. She stops for a moment, just to look him in the eye, before she shrugs the sleeves down her arms and off to fall in a pool of blue cotton on the floor.

Quieter now. She hears Illya’s slow inhale through his nose, watches him swallow. Gaby takes a breath of her own and sets her shoulders back, stands straight as if he’s inspecting her bare body for fault. He isn’t interested in that, never has been. He’s interested in the heating apples of her cheeks, which she can feel pinkening the longer he sits there, looking without touching her again, his broken arm resting back against his white t-shirt, his good hand clasping his own knee quite tightly. Gaby brushes his knuckles with her thigh to encourage him, and he reaches up to cup her hip.

“Gaby…” He kneads carefully, reacquainting himself with how her body responds to him. He palms up to her waist and he tightens his grip there too, as if she’ll form under his touch like clay. Maybe she could.

“Illya,” she returns coolly.

He shifts to sit on the edge of the couch and he stands her between his knees so she’ll stay exactly where she is. His hand slips around to the curve of her back and he presses, urging her even closer until she can feel his breath on her bare chest.

It’s her turn to make a move but Illya doesn’t give her the chance, only presses a kiss to the long, shallow line of her chest and lets out a heavy sigh there, his forehead resting between her breasts.

Gaby’s heart is racing. She wants to hold onto him, so she does. His hair is soft under her fingers, blond and clean. Gaby runs her fingers through it and he kisses her bare stomach again, huffs when she brushes gently over his ears, and when her palms come to rest under his jaw.

She tilts him up. Illya’s eyes are wide and blue.

“What’s the matter with you?”

Illya swallows. She feels it. “I miss you.”

Gaby strokes his bottom lip with her thumb. "Oh."

She wants to tear him down to the floor with her and grab onto him with all her strength. But he’s hurt. It has been so long. She will have to be patient.

“Get up,” she murmurs, taking his wrist to help him. “Come here.” Gaby feels his whole weight through her arm as he comes to stand, and once he’s up, all the way up, she only pulls him down again to capture him in a kiss.

It takes a moment for Illya’s lips to soften. It could be shock, or disbelief, but then he’s yielding to her like he’s following her, like he’s trying to get used to her again. She doesn’t have to get used to him. She remembers. Gaby cups his jaw to bring him down closer and she can feel Illya’s sigh through his nose, his body relaxing against hers, and soon he’s kissing her just like he used to. Just as soft, as earnest, as full of feeling. He tilts to kiss her deeper, warmer, until she parts his lips with her tongue and he lets out a cut little groan that sends shivers down her arms.

They kiss until she’s arching up to him, emptying her chest to get nearer, their bodies flush, and Illya can’t push into her back hard enough to get as close as they need to be. His sling is in the way, his neck craning to kiss her for so long, so she stops him, breathless, with a palm to his chest and a look beneath her lashes that says everything — neither of them have to say it, and so neither of them is to blame.

Gaby doesn’t have to lead him out of the living room. Illya ushers her ahead of him, stepping over her pyjamas to head straight for her bedroom, waiting for them at the end of the hall.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My loves, I'm sorry for the wait!!! But it's finished! It's finally done! I'm afraid I'll be uploading in two chapters for symmetry - I had no idea the last 'chapter' would be... 11k... This got wildly out of hand! But the fourth (sorry) chapter is **100%** completely written, edited, thrown away, rewritten, burned, rewritten, edited, stressfully wept on, used as a handkerchief, tossed off a bridge, rewritten, edited again, and formatted. It's complete! And I hope to post it tomorrow (the 1st of August!), because right now it's time for me to go the HECK to sleep lmao... Bless you all for staying tuned, and thank you so much for your enthusiasm and your lovely comments. I shan't lie, this has been a mammoth task to write, omg, but I promised I would finish, and finish I did! For all of you! As always, powered by blood, sweat, tears, and biscuits. And, as _always_ , much love! I've missed you all! xxx


	4. Reparation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last! Happy Birthday, turningleaf! A fully giftwrapped little parcel of sin. Drum roll, please...

 

They’re doing this.

Even grabbing onto his belt Gaby can barely stand on her own two feet. She can’t think at all when his kiss skips down her throat, his breath and his tongue teasing with a slow and promising heat.

“Illya, please,” she tries, huffing a laugh and fumbling with his belt buckle as he pushes even closer, trapping her hands between them.

“If my arm was not broken…” he rumbles, but he doesn’t finish, pulling her body against his. Gaby laughs, lightheaded, tipping her chin up for him to carry on. She can feel the hard length of his cock pressed against her and she thrills, a blush blooming in her cheeks and down her chest. Illya spots it and he gentles. He slows to kiss each cheek softly, deliberately.

What a stupid idea it was, denying herself this.

When Gaby pulls back she could laugh again for the puzzled look he gives her. Her heart is fizzing over. She has finished with his belt, so she tugs it out from all the loops to drop it on the floor. “Clothes,” she says, and snaps her fingers at him. “Chop chop.”

Illya’s smile is flat and knowing and he wastes no time in removing his sling to make a start. Gaby takes to the hem of his undershirt. The dressing on his brow is gone, but she doesn’t mind helping to guide his arm through anyway, rolling the white t-shirt down and off his cast until his chest is bare again. His waist, his shoulders. Gaby skims greedily down his sides, all his live warmth bleeding into her hands. She can watch his breathing now: unsteady, like hers. He straightens up as she runs her nails down his taut chest. She comes to rest at his waistband where the hair leads lower, coarse and blond, and she lets go.

“Your turn.”

Illya blinks, then he gives her a wry little nod; he's prepared to take his turn and share the blame, should this all go up in flames by tomorrow.

Gaby unties her ponytail and lets Illya stare at the stretch of her body as he steps out of his trousers, his underwear, and tugs off his socks. At last he’s standing tall in front of her, as bare as she’s ever seen him, with only a cast and a scattering of new scars to prove that any time has passed at all. He’s everything she’s missed. Gaby fears she’ll wake up. Perhaps she’s already calling him in from the other room and this is all a dream — not a nightmare, but a dream.

To touch him again will prove it. She brushes his chest with her fingertips then presses hard, as if leaving her palm prints in cement. Illya only covers her hand with his and steps back with her, feeling for the bed with his heels to sit down, to bring her with him. He scoots back, an exercise in patience and balance, to settle his shoulders against her headboard.

“Like this?” she asks, brow raised.

Illya hums affirmative, rolling his back against her pillows. It’s nice to see him there again. He urges her with a pat to the hip to climb onto the mattress too, to kneel over him and to sit back on his broad thighs.

He likes her like this. Illya lets his cast rest forgotten on his stomach as he strokes her bare waist appreciatively, steadying her there, just looking. The walls could fall in and he’d still be looking, waiting for her to tell him what to do. His lips are nearly swollen for her kisses and his cock is hard, ready, yet still he takes his time.

Gaby can’t help it. She throws her arms over Illya’s shoulders and hugs him tightly, nestling into the crook of his neck to kiss him there, to breathe him in. _Gott_ , she has missed that. Missed the rough, sandy stubble of his jaw, his neck, after just a day or two without shaving. She misses his soap, but he smells of her shampoo, and that’s reminder enough of when he used to stay here for nights on end — when he’d sleep beside her, and when she couldn't sleep at all. Gaby sinks into his hug, sorry for not having done this the moment she’d found him.

Illya strokes her side. “It’s OK,” he says, and she can feel it rumble through his chest, pressed so close to hers even with his stupid cast squashed between them. Gaby nods into the safe dark of his neck.

She pulls back to look him in the eye. He’ll see the embarrassing shine in hers now so she tries hard to blink it away. Illya just frowns and grazes her cheek with his thumb, smiles back only when Gaby rolls her eyes at her own behaviour.

“You missed me,” he says, and shrugs. “You should have said so. Much more efficient.”

“Yes, well, don’t go on about it.”

Illya smiles and tilts his head at her, his hand slipping down to her bottom and squeezing gently. “Would have been much more pleasant week.”

Gaby rolls her eyes again. Sitting on him, she leans over to rifle through her bedside drawer for the little blue box she keeps in there. Illya’s attention is piqued, sitting up straighter to see for himself. He soon settles when she fishes the last one out and throws the empty box off the bed. His face is a picture. “Then maybe you should shut up and make up for lost time.”

She hands it to him, and he looks at her like she’s given him a prize. Only when she raises an expectant brow at him does he seem to wake up, and he gets to work putting it on.

“Lost time,” he says, concentrating.

“Just,” Gaby starts, and when he’s finished she flattens her hands to his chest and wriggles her knees in closer. “You’re the one with the broken bones.” She daren’t say they shouldn’t be doing this at all. There’s no need to bring up the obvious, nor risk him adhering to his rules again. Their rules. “You don’t have to be so… careful. Not with me. Just treat me like you used to. Before.”

Illya finds this amusing. “You have thought of this.”

“Like you haven’t.” She shifts on his thighs, getting comfortable with his body beneath hers again. The cast follows him, a burden of white rock getting in the way of all his weight, his taut muscle and warm skin. If his arm was not broken… she glares at it hatefully for denying her the full Illya Kuryakin experience, and vows to burn it on a pyre once it’s been sawn off. “Of course, in your state I’m not expecting miracles.”

“There have been miracles?”

Gaby slaps his chest.

He smiles, accommodating, and he kisses her briskly before pulling her up to kneel in front of him again. There, Illya’s gaze draws from her spread thighs, her waist, her breasts, her lips, overcome by where to begin. He’s so close his warm breath ghosts over her nipples, peaking them. He discovers this and hums with interest.

Gaby’s steadying inhale is the only noise in the room, and Illya follows its movement through her chest and up her throat. When she takes another, he presses a kiss to the top of one small, soft breast. “Like I used to?" he muses, peering up beneath his brow. “I suppose you are in no hurry.”

For her dull glare he kisses her again, lower, and another. She should have known better than to encourage him to take his time. After a scattering of chaste kisses to her breasts he finally laves a nipple with his tongue and gently sucks.

Gaby groans and hangs her head. She sighs defeated into his hair, threads through it with her fingers. “No,” she relents. “I don’t suppose I am.”

He smiles, superior. It’s like flipping a switch, giving Illya permission. The hand on her back becomes a whole arm to hold her flush against him, and he continues. He promises slow exploration but he caves first. When Gaby allows herself a moan, keening for more, his breath deepens and he becomes impatient.

“You, in your bath…” he murmurs, cut off by his own hot sigh and an open kiss, tasting her skin. Gaby tugs at his hair to have him finish what he was saying, but he only grunts and nips her between his teeth. Gaby yelps so he slows to tease her with tenderness, warm and apologetic, but it’s only a new form of agony.

She’s too sensitive for this alone. Gaby’s patience is lost to the untouched heat building between her legs, the tingling pulse that she needs him to take care of, now, now, now. Illya shushes her, for whatever she’s saying, and then his hand is flush between her thighs, stroking gently to part her folds and circle her, sliding easily through the wetness she can feel, and hear. If it weren’t for his low moan for finding her so ready for him, or the throb of his cock grazing her bottom, she’d be embarrassed. Looking to Illya and expecting smug self-satisfaction, she only finds his pupils blown and his gaze low, enraptured, as he watches her thighs tense and her stomach flicker with every tilt of his wrist.

Gaby swallows with a dry throat.

Yes. It was stupid to deny herself this.

She can’t dwell for long. Illya brushes her with the firm tips of his fingers and Gaby tips forwards on her knees, clamps both her hands around his working wrist, right where his watch ought to be. Gaby holds her breath, gripping to keep him there, to keep his fingers _exactly_ there.

“I—” she manages. His touch doesn’t falter; he remembers her. He’s done this often enough to know that these gasps, this grip, this cant of her hips doesn’t, under any circumstances, mean stop. “Illya… Illya, you— Oh…”

Illya kisses the shell of her ear. He hums, understanding, and he slips inside to continue stroking her gently. Gaby moans and rolls down firmer into his lap, searching for more, so he slips in a second finger, keeping his pace.

She can’t take it. Gaby takes his cock, hard and staggeringly hot in her palm. She shares his gasp, reunited with the size of him and the thrill for having him like this. It's all for her. He’s here for her.

He hums, low and pleased, and hurries his hand from between her thighs to grab her waist instead. His fingerprints are warm, wet. Gaby draws him back, strokes the head through her slick, teasing him while having mercy on herself. She keens softly, crosses an arm over his shoulders to steady herself. His cast grazes her stomach and she knows he needs both hands to touch her, can see his frustration for being so restrained. She ought to give him more, since he can’t take all he wants.

“Lie down,” she urges, dipping close to kiss his parted lips. “Lie down, Illya. I want— You should lie down.”

He does as she says. She steadies his cast as he shifts down her sheets with her, a delicious friction, until his head is on the pillows, his cast settled flat on his stomach. To see him here again, spread out on her bedding, bare and broad. His hair is a mess already. Gaby can’t help but spread down over him, elbows in the mattress to kiss his cheek, his neck, his eager mouth.

“Good,” she murmurs against him and, sitting back up, Illya’s soft smile as he adjusts his pillow is enough. “Good?”

Illya nods dazedly, hot and straining. “Very,” he rumbles, urging her down with a spread of his thighs, his hand on her hip. Gaby reaches between them to steady his cock and, savouring his anticipation, she guides him in.

Full, and so hot. Illya grabs on and curses, his head tipping back and his teeth gritted.

Gaby braces her hands on him, her thighs spread, and she tries to settle down into the cradle of his hips. It’s a lot, perhaps too much at once, but now that she has him here she wants all of him. She wriggles. He moans. Illya digs his heels into the mattress and he shifts his hips, adjusting, and Gaby lets out her long-held breath with a sigh when she spreads her knees even farther apart too, grinding down to take him in as deeply as she can. The friction is tempting. The weight of him beneath her again encourages more strenuous activity than she ought to give a wounded man.

But he is nothing if not persevering.

“Gaby—” he tries, and swallows. He accepts another kiss, chaste and sweet, to reassure him that she knows what she’s doing.

Illya holds her hip and rolls up into her with a slow, deep thrust. Gaby keens low, her hair falling forward as she braces herself on his stomach. She rocks down, meeting his upstroke with a desperate roll of her hips to take more of him, clamping against his sides. Illya’s wide-eyed surprise gives way to something heated, and a very hard grip on her waist. She holds his eye. She sets the pace. Her thighs tense and the mattress dips as she digs her knees in, palms spread over his stomach as she begins to ride.

Illya’s heavy groan rumbles under her fingers, his chest and neck darkening with heat. There's nothing complacent about him here. Soon there’s power, his feet planting behind her and his hips bucking up to fuck her harder, slicker, as Gaby grips onto him and moans deep with the force of it.

“M-more, Illya,” she gasps, arching forward and burying her hands in the sheets. “ _More_.”

His breath is ragged, shot with hard grunts as he grabs her spread her and hold her tight. She’s perfectly full, too deep, too hot— Gaby spreads her fingers on his chest, revelling in his sounds, feeling him work harder to meet her, to find that spot that makes her thighs shake and her gasps turn to cries.

With one eager thrust Illya’s cast drops from his stomach and he grimaces for the pain, teeth bared. He falters in his rhythm only slightly before shoving it back into place.

“C-careful, Illya,” she breathes, pushing his sweaty hair back. “ _Careful_.”

Illya laughs roughly, and carries on.

 

 

She can’t feel her legs. Her dancer’s thighs can only take so much exertion, and Illya’s stamina had… surprised her, so soon after his recovery, so long since she’d last had him. It would be a lie to say she’d forgotten his determination to please. She is only too happy to have revisited it.

Gaby arches her back and groans happily, sliding down the pillows to indulge into a long stretch, top to toe. She can’t summon the strength to do much else. She turns her head to look up at Illya, his good arm soon tucking beneath her shoulders to curl her into his side. She rolls in close. Stamina or none, he’s still panting slightly, his chest rising and falling under the hand she flattens there. It is a very powerful feeling, reducing a man like Illya to this.

“You’re out of practice,” she decides, patting him there. It’s easier to tease him than to admit they should have been more careful, considering his condition. She’d hate to think he’s overexerted himself.

Illya opens one eye and he uses it to see straight through her. “Much catching up to do,” he agrees, and squeezes her hard in retort.

Gaby peels back from his too hot body and leans up on her front, elbows braced in the mattress. She looks down at his sweat-sheened skin, his blond hair pushed back by her greedy hands. His neck is inviting, warm and still working hard to come to rest, but he’s content. Slowing down. He strokes her arm with the back of his knuckles, rolls his head to look at her.

Gaby rests her chin in her palm. “I suppose this is all over, now.”

Illya only tuts, reaches up to stroke her cheek. “Twenty minutes,” he says, and smirks. “I am only one man.”

“Not that,” she says. She covers his hand to pull it away. He frowns but she perseveres, looking him dead in the eye. It’s her own punishment, facing him at last. She shouldn’t have kept it from him. “I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

He gives her a tired, flat look, and when she starts worrying at her bottom lip with her teeth he only tuts at her. “Stop that.” He pushes her wrist with his. “You bite too hard it will fall off.”

Gaby tries not to smile. She tosses her head to brush her fringe out of her eyes. “They have an apartment for you. It’s close to work. Solo says it’s near the subway, and it’s on that market street you like, so, that will be better than the old one. I think this one has a gymnasium in the basement. They have swept and vetted the whole building. You could even leave tonight, if you wanted to.”

He’s still looking at her. Dark blond lashes and patient eyes, and just the slightest furrow of his brow. Then he softens. He tucks her hair behind her ear and holds her gaze but he doesn’t say a word. He has to say something. He should accuse her of tricking him, of trapping him, but he doesn’t. He just keeps looking.

“I wanted to tell you,” she defends.

Illya smiles, just slightly. He trails his hand down the nape of her neck, brushes her hair over her shoulder. And then he looks quite sheepishly down at her duvet.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“Perhaps I should have told you, too.”

Gaby halts. She takes his chin to turn him back up to her and he is just as gentle, but with all the reticence of a schoolboy caught red-handed.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I know,” Illya tells her. “I know about this new apartment.”

Holding his stare, daring him to fold and call his own bluff, Gaby scoffs. “What, that snake Napoleon Solo told you that, too?”

“Yes.”

Gaby sits up. “That’s what the Russian and the whispering was all about. You lied to me.”

“No,” Illya clarifies, firm. “No, I did not lie to you. He did want gossip, that night. I refused to give it to him. He told me about the apartment before this. Different telephone call.”

“Which call?”

“The night you worked together.” Illya gestures for her hand. After a long and begrudging stare between the two of them, Gaby drops it heavily in his lap. Illya strokes his thumb over her knuckles thoughtfully, reunited with a keepsake he’d lost. He is remarkably calm. “When he told me where you were, and when to expect you back. He said that the apartment was available, and that I was free to do what I wished with this information.”

That's why he was acting so strangely... She knew he'd had something, she knew he'd had a secret, too. Illya turns her hand over and over as if looking for injury. There’s nothing there. Postponing work with he and Napoleon has spared her more cuts and bruises since working in the chop shop.

“You didn’t tell me,” she accuses.

He gives her a sanctimonious little look. “You did not tell me, either.”

“I was going to! I wanted to…” she trails out to nothing. How can she begrudge him a secret? He’s right. She hadn’t. And she hasn’t given him his watch.

Watching her stare dully at their joined hands, Illya sighs through his nose. He brings her to lie down and pulls her in close again, ignoring her scowl completely. He murmurs something Russian, something she has heard before but has never bothered to question. She knows it has always been a gentle scolding, and always too long to be anything but a bizarre and untranslatable endearment. Then he presses a long held kiss to her hairline, and he leaves it be.

Gaby is so distracted by this tenderness that her fury, despite all her effort to keep hold of it very firmly, is doused like a fire by water. She dims, softens. She flattens her hand on his cast in surrender. She lays her ear on his chest and she listens.

This is the right thing to do. Illya brushes her hair from his face and wraps his good arm around her back, warm and secure.

“I did not know he had told you, too,” he confesses, deep voice rumbling under her cheek. “I wanted to tell you as soon as you came back. But, of course, you were late. I waited, like I said. I worried. Then you came home. You were fine. You scolded me. You told me to come to bed, like you used to, and what could I do? I wanted to go to bed with you again. I thought I had lost you. I wanted to be with you. So, I did not tell you.”

The beat of Illya’s heart is steady and calm under her ear, far more so than hers would be. But Illya has always had that certainty in him; if he knows something to be true, to be right, he’d recite it long after being lowered into his own grave. And here, with his heartbeat and that same unrelenting rhythm she’d missed, so many sleepless nights unresolved without it... It’s like coming home. She can’t find an ounce of fight left in her. She’s tired, and he’s back, with every gentle part of him miraculously still in tact.

What a waste those weeks had been without him, before he’d been taken from her. That agreement… For what? If he had been with her that night, where he has always belonged, perhaps none of this would have happened at all.

“I missed you,” Gaby tells him.

Illya tuts. He covers her ear with his palm until he’s all she can hear. Everything there is.

 

 

She doesn’t dream. When the blue light of very early morning colours Gaby’s bedroom, Illya’s arm is still wrapped around her shoulders and her cheek is still flush to his chest. It rises and falls with his deep, untroubled sleep.

Gaby tilts to look up at him. She can only see the grazing stubble of his jaw and the crinkles at the corner of his eyes that have deepened tenfold since she’d met him. All that squinting. Squinting for the sun on the whitest peaks of the alps couldn’t compare to the looks Illya could give her when trying to figure her out.

This morning he won’t need to. She’ll give him everything she has.

Before being a spy, before being a mechanic, Gaby was a ballerina. It doesn’t take much to delicately slip unnoticed from the arms of a very sated, well-rested Illya. The sleeping Russian only huffs when she leaves him, satisfied enough by the pulled-up duvet but frowning for the loss of her body.

She won’t be long.

Gaby tiptoes into her hallway, nude and with intent. She finds her coat, fishes through the pocket, and returns like a thief to the bedroom without a sound. She creeps back into bed — shivery for this time of year, too quickly accustomed to the return of Illya’s radiating body heat— and she settles back down. As if she hadn’t left at all, Illya only drowsily pulls her against him again, her arm arranged to lie on his stomach like another part of the bedding.

 

 

It has been half an hour but Gaby still doesn’t have it in her to wake him. Warming the watch in her palm until it’s the same temperature as her body, rolling it up and wrapping it around her fingers, Gaby aimlessly predicts his possible reaction. What he might say, or do.

No matter how long she stews, there is only one way to find out.

The cooling disk of his watch face, laid down gently on his chest, wakes him.

Illya covers her hand there, frowning. “Mm,” he manages, rumbling and deep.

She feels it and can’t help but smile. “Mm,” she agrees.

He pats gently, doesn’t bother to open his eyes. “What is that?”

“Why don’t you guess?”

Defiant, Illya blinks himself awake and takes in the room in one broad sweep. A habit of his. He lifts Gaby’s hand to hold it and he stares at the thing left on his chest. He swallows, looking. “Gaby.”

She picks the watch up for him when all he does is stare. “It is yours, isn’t it? I had to…” She thinks carefully, gauging in his expression. “It has changed, but it’s still the same.”

After some wary consideration, Illya elbows his way up the mattress to join her in leaning back against the pillows. He adjusts his cast, then gestures to take the watch and have a look for himself. Gaby hands it to him. He flips the watch over and thoughtfully feels the familiar, worn holes in the straps with his thumb. His hand is shaking.

“Where?”

“The inventory office, like you said.”

Illya considers this for a while, still staring at the glass, the silver back. “New,” he notes.

“Yours.”

He nods, troubled.

Gaby fastens his father’s watch around his wrist for him, the old leather slipping as comfortably into place as if it had never been taken off.

Illya looks for a very long time. When he turns his gaze to her at last, she could burn under it. All deep blue bewilderment and something so determined, so certain, underneath. All so soon after waking up. Perhaps she ought to have let him eat breakfast first, stretch his legs… perhaps even go for round two.

But she wants this morning to be a beginning, and for that they need to start again. From the top.

“I went there for you,” Gaby confesses. She decides to play with the strap of his watch rather face his stare directly. “That’s why I went to the compound. You lost your watch. You needed it back, so I went to get it. It wasn’t hard.”

Illya takes her by the chin and he kisses her, close and firm. Gaby expects that their round two is finally imminent, and is already shifting her thigh to throw it over him when he cuts her off with a brisk, hard peck, having caught himself taking too much. “Thank you. But you should not have gone. It was not your assignment. Waverly will be angry.”

“I suppose we’ll see on Monday.”

Illya hums, grim. “Monday.”

“You should come back,” Gaby offers, as casually as she can. “I’m sure they will have a girl type up the rest of your paperwork.”

“Ah,” he says, warm. “No. There is no getting out of this. You are the girl, and it is only Friday morning. Plenty of time to finish before Monday.”

“That’s how you want to spend this weekend? Sat at my table, dictating.”

“Only requires notebook, pen,” Illya decides and shrugs, wincing for the shift of his forgotten cast. “Can be done in bed.”

Gaby smirks, halts his wandering eyes and hand with a flick under his chin.. “Bold to assume you’re invited to stay... What about your new flat?”

Illya’s gentle gaze stutters. His eyes dart between hers, looking for the right thing to say: the professional one, the truthful one. Eventually he spots the dimples forming around her smile, so he huffs a cheated laugh and nestles his head back against the pillows. How far he’s come since being in that hospital bed. He raises a brow, all indifference, and Gaby waits for him to play his game.

“Perhaps I don’t like this new flat,” he tries out.

“Oh?”

“Low ceilings.”

“Ah.”

“What use is gymnasium with this?” Illya gestures with his broken arm minutely, and Gaby lays a palm on it to keep it settled down.

“You’ve made your point. Don’t hurt yourself.”

Illya hums. Settling, he has her rest her head on his outstretched arm again. The warmth of his skin heats under Gaby’s cheek. She closes her eyes. She can still smell his clean sweat, feel his resting heartbeat in his bicep. Gaby touches him because she can, tracing the contours of his chest, his shoulders. She knows he has something to say because he’s too still. He’s breathing too consciously, looking for an in.

“We have broken our rules,” he says, at last.

Gaby tilts to look at him. Of course he’s already peering down at her from the corner of his eye. His hand comes up behind her head and tucks her tangled hair behind her ear. His gaze doesn’t waver. He’s not afraid of what they’ve done.

She used to be, before. He’d known it, too. It had frightened her when Illya would still hold her like this, sometimes especially tighter, on the nights she’d insisted didn’t mean anything. He’d seen straight through her. Still does. She’d brush him off and he’d nod and he’d leave and he’d return the next night too, because she wanted him to, and he’d known she would never ask it of him. She has always been as stubborn as he is. She’s had a lifetime to build a wall, but this look of his… Well, being looked at like this could easily chisel each brick from its mortar, one by one.

On every mission since Paris Illya had returned to her bed only to wrap around her, to undress her under the sheets while she’d peppered him with questions about his evening’s work. He’d relay every detail, though he’d certainly known better. She wanted distraction, and he knew she’d wanted him too. He has always seen what she wouldn’t say and he’d covered her with the most passionate body she’s ever known, all weight and skill and tender skin and heat, until she’d forgotten there had been a wall inside her to fortify at all.

It’s easier to pretend not to want something. That way, when it’s taken away it doesn’t show. It can’t leave a hole on the shelf, in the heart, it can’t be missed. What a waste of time. Solo saw straight through her on the morning they announced their agreement. When Illya was declared MIA, Waverly rejected her demand to run the operation. She was too close and she always would be. She was too close to Illya to see straight, to think straight, and she’d fooled herself into thinking that removing him was a remedy rather than an all-out amputation.

She’d nearly lost him.

Now she has him.

Gaby shifts and she kisses him, very gently. “Stay,” she murmurs, pressing her lips to his scar, his cheek, the warmth of his neck. She leans over to kiss the shoulder of his broken arm too, and feels him softening even deeper under her warm attention. “Stay here, until Monday at least.”

Illya tries to keep up with her wandering kisses, his hand roving between her shoulders. She can feel his watch strap again, cuffing the trailing heat of his palm. “Stay here.”

Gaby hums into his neck.

“Until Monday,” he ventures, warily.

She nods. “Well,” she says, smiling up at him. “For a while.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading and for sharing your thoughts!! You truly kept me going!!!!! I hope this fic even makes one lick of sense - I've been staring at it and deleting as much as i've been writing literally e v e r y single day since posting chapter two, and right now it's all hieroglyphic. It's out there. I've tossed it to the wind. It's the world wide web's problem now!!!!
> 
> By "happy ending" I meant, of course, a very thorough bonk. Let's ignore the hours and hours of negotiation these two are going to partake in while lounging around very happily and very nakedly to establish a professional and also completely unprofessional relationship!!! Solo, of course, will take only a gentle beating from Gaby's handbag when she returns to HQ for spilling all her secrets, but having indirectly given Illya back to her, too. Once Illya gets his cast off he'll give Solo a clap around the ear, too, and be MORE than making up for lost time with Gaby... hmm.... hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...................... 
> 
> Yell with me!!! I'd love to hear from you all, and thank you for sticking around and being so patient with me, loves xxx


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